Date: Fri 15-Jan-1999

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

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Powell-Rowland-commentary

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COMMENTARY: How Will Rowland Spend All His Political Capital?

By Chris Powell

Having won the biggest victory in a gubernatorial election in Connecticut in

modern times, becoming the first Republican re-elected governor in Connecticut

in 54 years, and having received the Democratic legislative leadership's full

support in grossly overpaying for and permanently subsidizing a National

Football League franchise even before the new General Assembly convened,

Governor Rowland has entered his second term with as much political capital as

any governor could have without a majority of his party in the legislature.

What will he do with it?

Rowland's inaugural remarks to the legislature last week were perfunctory and

gave few clues. He noted that the challenge facing state government in good

times is to restrain spending; then, Clinton-like, in the next breath he took

credit for several recent spending programs. But maybe this matters little;

the governor's 1999-2000 budget proposal will be delivered to the legislature

in a few weeks and it will speak for itself.

The one fight already shaping up is over the Rowland administration's plan to

privatize state computer operations. The plan is said likely to lead to a

multi-year contract costing $1 billion while somehow saving the government as

much as $50 million per year. Having waited until the election was safely

past, as it did with the plan to build a stadium for the New England Patriots,

the administration tentatively has chosen Electronic Data Services of Texas

for the computer work.

While part of the plan has been to guarantee the state's own computer

employees jobs with the private company, most of those employees are against

it. They acknowledge that nothing can match the job security of working for

state government. One union leader grouses, "The Rowland administration just

wants to get rid of state employees."

The great advantages touted for privatizing the state's computers are

uniformity and linkage -- giving computers in all state agencies the ability

to "talk to each other." Unfortunately none of the major problems of state

government -- like the abandonment of educational standards, welfare's

subsidizing antisocial behavior, the incompetence and even impossibility of

protecting children in abusive households, and the general explosion of public

costs -- has anything to do with computers.

While it might be good for certain related agencies to share computerized

databases, so what if someone at the Permanent Commission on the Status of

Women still has to pick up the telephone and call someone at the Agriculture

Department to learn how many cows live in Goshen?

Besides, the Rowland administration more or less suggested the other day that

state government is futile regardless, with or without better computers. That

is, the administration acknowledged that a supervisor at the Department of

Children and Families who had been noisily fired for negligence in connection

with the death of still another of the department's young wards had quietly

won reinstatement through a grievance procedure.

Maybe this would be more of an outrage if it had been the first reinstatement

of a state employee who had caused or substantially contributed to a death in

the course of his work. But it wasn't, and it is the sort of thing that argues

for privatizing all government operations and dealing only with contractors

who can be dismissed for inadequate performance, rather than with employees,

who, given state public employee labor law and union contracts, now escape

accountability.

So if only the fears of the state employee union leaders were well-grounded;

if only the Rowland administration was determined to get rid of even one state

employee -- apart from Kathleen Curry. Curry, of course, is the Democratic

political appointee at the Consumer Protection Department who eventually

nestled into a high position covered by civil service law before being granted

time off to work in the 1994 campaign of her brother, former state Comptroller

William E. Curry Jr, then Rowland's leading rival for the governor's job.

Understandably enough, it seems someone in the new Rowland administration --

it may never be clear just who -- didn't like Kathleen Curry's coming back to

a supposedly non-political state job so quickly after she did her best to

defeat the new governor, and so her job was eliminated in a convenient

reorganization. She sued and recently the administration settled by agreeing

to pay her more than a half-million dollars in nobody's money and to credit

her with many years toward an early state pension, also to be paid with

nobody's money.

It's not as if Curry had suffered terribly by her dismissal; an able political

operative, she found another Democratic political job. Since the Rowland

administration was not prepared to go to court to deny that Curry had been let

go on account of politics from a position that had protection against politics

(even though, like some others, she had been hired precisely because of

politics), getting fired turned out for her like hitting the lottery.

But if the Curry case wasn't a good one to fight to the finish, the case of

the fired and reinstated DCF supervisor might be, since some good would come

even of losing it: some public enlightenment and exposure of the Democrats'

subservience to the public employee unions.

After all, if state law and union contracts forbid disciplinary action against

a state employee whose negligence led to the death of a child, that law and

those contracts could be changed by a government that wanted to regain its

self-respect. A governor who had just won an election with two-thirds of the

vote and had pledged himself to protect abused children might make a great

cause of something like this... might even win it.

Or he might just shrug it off, as previous administrations have done, and look

forward to football, where supervisors who are fired are compensated even more

lavishly than Kathleen Curry and, in Connecticut, soon will be compensated

with nobody's money too.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)