Thursday, May. 21, 2009

Scoppe: The governor’s good vetoes

MARK SANFORD’s budget veto message is a heart-breaking reminder of the tragedy of his governorship.

Not those first 15 pages that are full of misleading numbers and irrelevant charts that look like they demonstrate things they don’t actually demonstrate. The next 18 pages.

Since he took office, Mr. Sanford has had a great talent for striking down the worst of the worst of the budget provisos — instructions to state agencies that are supposed to (and usually, but not always, do) simply direct them how to spend the money — and setting out logical arguments for why they are a bad idea. That is what he did on the final 18 pages of the veto message he sent lawmakers Tuesday, singling out 47 provisos, most of which we would be much better off without.

Unfortunately, the Legislature dealt with his 2004 vetoes in a most irresponsible way (overriding 105 of 106 of them in 90 minutes, before most legislators even had a chance to hear his arguments), which prompted his even more-irresponsible response (carrying two squealing, defecating piglets into the State House in a made-for-TV protest), which made legislators even more angry, which made the governor even more provocative, which made legislators even more determined to ignore him, which made him even less concerned about making nice — or acting responsibly — which prompted legislators to not just ignore him but punish him, which ....

You get the point. And all of that was before he united just about the entire Legislature — Republican and Democrat and, more significantly, House and Senate — in seething opposition to his campaign to reject federal stimulus funding unless it is used to not stimulate the economy.

Which brings us back to Tuesday’s vetoes. Though the Legislature was still dealing with them at my deadline, it was on its way to summarily dismissing most of them. But just because the Legislature ignored his good points doesn’t mean the rest of us should. Just the opposite, in fact, because he points to continuing problems with the way the Legislature does its job (and sometimes his) that we’re going to have to deal with eventually, though almost certainly not until we get a new governor.

So, here goes. Some of his smartest vetoes strike down legislative provisos that:

• Direct the state Medicaid agency — which is struggling to provide essential care to the state’s poorest residents — to cover chiropractic services. The governor noted that federal rules require the state to provide this coverage to no one or to everyone, and as a result “Last year, HHS spent almost $221,000 to provide chiropractic services to nearly 1,500 children younger than the age of 12 even though there is not medical research supporting the benefits of those treatments for young children.” Ah, but there is research demonstrating the generosity of the chiropractic profession when it comes to making campaign donations to legislators.

• Grant county legislative delegations control over state Department of Natural Resources funds that go to their counties. As he noted, the state Supreme Court has struck down as unconstitutional a nearly identical law, ruling that the Legislature “may not undertake both to pass laws and to execute them by bestowing upon its own members functions belonging to other branches of government.”

• Give approval authority over the sale of the natural Resources property to the Legislature’s Joint Bond Review Committee — assaulting if not violating the state constitution. Or, as Mr. Sanford correctly put it, “yet another usurpation of executive authority by the General Assembly.”

• Prohibit the governor’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism from pursuing public-private partnerships involving Cheraw Sate Park or Hickory Knob State Park. I don’t believe that privatization is automatically a good idea, but there are in fact some circumstances where it makes sense. The governor notes that when PRT outsourced its park reservation system, it resulted in “vastly improved services, lowered costs for taxpayers, and generated higher revenue.”

• Transfer the Aeronautics Division from the governor’s Commerce Department to the Budget and Control Board that he chairs but has no control over. He called the move, which would prevent his agency from saving money by cutting pilots, relocating operations and contracting out maintenance, part of a pattern in which “the executive branch will come up with a cost saving — only to have the function taken from the executive branch after change has been proposed.”

• Prohibit the Highway Patrol from charging fees for traffic control at college football games, races, golf tournaments and other money-making events. Mr. Sanford, who has targeted this proviso since his first budget, argued that since the Department of Public Safety’s budget has been cut by 16 percent since last year, it should “not be forced to subsidize traffic control for the entities that use this service, especially since the universities are achieving record revenue from the television broadcasts of athletic games.”

• Require SLED — or, if it is created, the new, unnecessary Capitol Police Force — to provide a “security detail“ for the lieutenant governor. This is another one that Mr. Sanford has tried unsuccessfully to eliminate before. As then-Lt. Gov. Bob Peeler explained when he eliminated the service, there simply is no justification for the taxpayers to provide a driver for a part-time official whose duties are purely political.

• Require the directors of Cabinet agencies — but not the directors of the many, many more agencies that do not report directly to the governor, or anyone else for that matter — to report monthly to the Legislature “about any time spent away from their main offices during business hours if that time is not related to their agency’s mission,” and require him to set up a new office that “must consolidate administrative functions of only cabinet agencies.”

This is a classic example of a specific problem Mr. Sanford brought on himself, by not attending to widespread complaints that his PRT director doesn’t bother to show up for work most of the time, but he is right when he asks, “If legislators want to know what cabinet heads are doing outside of their agency’s mission during work hours, then shouldn’t they also want to know what other agency heads are doing?”

• Maintain authorization for the now (finally) defunct legislative slush fund ironically dubbed the “Competitive Grants” program. The governor is not being paranoid when he says that he fears that “leaving these provisos in the budget could prolong the possibility that this program might be revived.”

• Further reduce funding for counties if they do not maintain a set level of funding for county legislative delegations. It’s ridiculous to spend any money to maintain “county delegation” offices, but at the least, as Mr. Sanford argues, “If legislators think their county delegations deserve funding, then they should find the funds without putting the funding obligations on the backs of the county governments.”

• Require the PRT to close the gift shop at the governor’s mansion — and prohibit it from closing the State House gift shop and the Santee Welcome Center, which cost more to operate. PRT had suggested closing all three, but legislators decided to close the one associated with the governor and “give special protection to two other less productive shops in an effort to reward political patronage rather than make responsible budget cuts.”

It’s hard to argue with Mr. Sanford’s logic on these and several other vetoes. But legislative leaders don’t really have to, because when you shine a light into the forest, and everybody is so mad that they’re seeing red, it illuminates nothing.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

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