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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 8, 1994                   TAG: 9406080074
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GOV. ALLEN'S FRIDAY MASSACRE

After last Friday's massacre of state-agency heads, most of them apolitical professionals who had helped maintain Virginia's good-government reputation through various swings of partisan fortune, this assumption is open to question. Allen's idea of reinventing state government seems to be to tackle it with a wrecking ball, then erect a personal fiefdom in its stead. We hope this impression is in error.

The wrecking ball swung wide and hard, unceremoniously ending the careers of the heads of 14 state agencies, including several of Virginia's most knowledgeable and respected state-agency managers.

As the first Republican governor in 12 years, Allen's desire to sweep out political appointees of the Democratic Robb-Baliles-Wilder era, and to install his own team, is understandable and justifiable. But the heads that rolled last week belonged, by and large, to nonpartisan career workers; the careers of several spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Examples of the displaced:

Ralph G. Cantrell, who was appointed to head the Virginia Employment Commission by Republican Gov. John Dalton, and was subsequently reappointed by Democratic Govs. Charles Robb, Gerald Baliles and Douglas Wilder.

Dr. Robert Stroube, who joined the state Department of Health 20 years ago during the Republican administration of Mills Godwin Jr., then rose to become the department's commissioner.

Kenneth Thorson, who has guided the Virginia Lottery since shortly after it won approval in a November 1987 referendum. A deputy attorney general at the time, Thorson was chosen by then-Gov. Baliles precisely because he was a nonpolitical figure who had not been a public supporter of the lottery. (In fact, Thorson acknowledged, he had as a private citizen voted against it.) Thorson's conservative, lawyerly approach to the lottery's management is widely credited for its reputation as one of the most successful and scrupulous lotteries in the nation; it is now the state's third-largest revenue producer.

Richard Burton, who was regarded as a genuine expert on highly technical matters that came under the purview of his agency, the state Department of Environmental Quality.

This is not the first year that the Virginia governorship has changed parties; it went from Democratic to Republican in 1969, from Republican to Democratic in 1981. Nor is it the first time that a new governor, whether of the same or the other party of his predecessor, has changed agency heads; this is a governor's prerogative. Unprecedented in recent memory, however, is the sweep and suddenness of such ousters, and the consequent implication that heretofore nonpolitical jobs are being turned into partisan sinecures.

That may not prove the case, but the burden is Allen's to show that it won't. Meanwhile, the purge's timing, on a Friday afternoon when public attention was riveted on the opening of the state GOP convention, and the lack of adequate explanation for it, suggest that improving state government wasn't foremost among the governor's motives.