Wednesday, May. 28, 2008

Bill in Senate can make government work a little better

IMAGINE WHAT could happen if South Carolina had a Legislature that was able to act like a legislature and a governor who was allowed to act like a governor.

Lawmakers would know much more about how state agencies operate, so they could make better laws and better decisions about which programs are working well and should be funded, which ones aren’t working at all or are inefficient and need to be eliminated or fixed.

The governor would have the power to make sure those agencies do the job they’re supposed to, and the incentive to do so — the knowledge that if things don’t work, the voters will blame him and him alone.

A bill awaiting Senate debate would move us in that direction — taking a big step on the first count and another baby step on the second.

The legislation is built around the notion Sen. Vincent Sheheen has been pushing that government restructuring doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, where the governor becomes more powerful, making the Legislature less powerful by comparison. It needn’t be simply a matter of giving the governor more authority to run the executive branch of government; it must also give the Legislature the tools it needs to provide effective oversight of a more powerful chief executive. After all, the idea of checks and balances depends upon having three branches of government with roughly equal powers. (The courts are another matter, which unfortunately lawmakers aren’t ready to address.)

The bill, which passed the House unanimously last month, would assign every state agency to a House and a Senate committee, require those committees to review each agency’s operations every four years and authorize them to investigate problems at any time. That should result in a Legislature that knows much more about how well the programs and policies it has passed are working, and doesn’t merely react to the latest crisis in government.

It also would create a Department of Administration, answerable to the governor, to take over many duties from the Budget and Control Board. This one-of-a-kind creature, composed of the governor, treasurer, comptroller general and the chairmen of the Legislature’s budget-writing committees, oversees a similarly named agency in charge of such central administrative functions as human resources, procurement, fleet management, the state employee health and retirement systems, computer and phone operations.

This bill is not the last word on restructuring. The oversight provisions will be only as good as the Legislature chooses to make them. The executive portion leaves many important executive duties in the Budget and Control Board, making it impossible to hold any one person responsible when things go wrong; and it leaves us with more than 80 state agencies, far too many of which are still controlled by part-time boards that are free to do pretty much anything they want.

Even so, it’s no sure thing the bill will pass before the Legislature adjourns. Sens. Jake Knotts and Robert Ford have placed a hold on the bill, so the Senate can’t even debate it unless senators give a priority debate slots — which they fell just short of doing Tuesday.

They must. This bill doesn’t upset the balance of power — the Legislature will still be the dominant political force in this state if it passes. What it does is make our government a little more responsive to the public, and a little more efficient, and probably even a little more competent. And we certainly need that.