
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 31, 1990                   TAG: 9007310396
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOBILE, ALA.                                LENGTH: Medium

GOVERNORS WANT PANEL CREATED TO PROBE S&LS

The nation's governors are ending their summer conference, pressing for a commission to investigate the savings and loan crisis and complaining about the Bush administration's latest tax plan.

The bipartisan National Governors' Association was holding a final session today to consider resolutions, including the one on the S&L debacle, and to install Washington Gov. Booth Gardner, a Democrat, as the new chairman.

The governors also were holding party caucuses, with the Democrats planning to elect Colorado's Roy Romer and Mississippi's Ray Mabus chairman and vice chairman of their Democratic Governors' Association.

Gardner said Monday that he planned to shift the governors' association's focus to health-care problems - including cost containment and broader access to care for the poor - during his one-year term.

"The arena is moving toward the states," he said. "Neither the administration nor Congress wants to deal with it."

Governors in both parties voiced concern about the growing size of the S&L bailout, topping $300 billion by some estimates.

But the policy statement of concern approved by the association's executive committee - and up for a vote today by the full association - drew quick rejection from the White House and a Republican charge of partisanship.

"We do feel it is unnecessary to create another bureaucratic body," Stephen Hart, a deputy White House press secretary, said in Washington.

"We think the best thing to do is to work quickly on the current caseload with the funds and the processes we now have in place which are working," Hart said. "We feel it's not time to point fingers but it's time to get the money that's owed to the depositors back in their hands."

"It appears to be somewhat partisan-driven," said Republican Gov. Carroll Campbell of South Carolina. "It gets a little testy in an election year."

The statement on S&Ls asks Congress and the White House to establish a national commission to investigate the crisis. It was pushed by Virginia's Democratic Gov. Douglas Wilder, who said the commission should find the failures behind the S&L crisis and a way to provide "equitable recovery" of taxpayers' money.

Campbell said Democrats would find plenty of blame "in their own back yard."

by CNB