Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 3, 1995 TAG: 9501070056
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
To help get out of a self-generated budget hole, the governor would whack away nearly half the higher-ed council's previously approved $2.9 million appropriation for the 1995-96 fiscal year. At least one-third of the council's 48-person staff would be axed.
If the point is budget-conscious provision of state-government services, then Allen is proposing the functional equivalent of burning the village in order to save it. One of the council's chief duties is cost-control coordination of Virginia's semiautonomous colleges and universities - helping, for example, to referee their redundant ambitions - and it's a job the council does well.
In a report just last month, the legislative watchdog on state agencies gave the council unusually high marks. The council, concluded the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, "is appropriately structured to coordinate the higher-education system in Virginia as intended by the General Assembly"; is "effective in providing the type and degree of system oversight needed"; and is "generally . . . doing a good job of fulfilling its mandated responsibilities."
Moreover, that "good job" came as the council was responding to the genuine, recession-induced budget crunches during the administration of Douglas Wilder, Allen's predecessor. The council's current staff is down by nearly 20 percent from 1990; its current budget is down by about 25 percent.
Other state agencies, including the individual colleges and universities, also have had to respond to demands for restructuring and reform. In recent years, the council has assisted Virginia's higher-education institutions in addressing those challenges, protecting educational quality while saving the state untold millions. The framework for change has been, appropriately, a balance that avoids centralized regimentation at one extreme and uncoordinated anarchy at the other.
While policy goals and constraints set in Richmond have always existed, as they should, Virginia governors and lawmakers on the whole have avoided intrusive, hyperpolitical micromanagement of higher education. Allen seems either not to understand the wisdom of this tradition - or, worse, not to care.
Is it a coincidence that the governor, in targeting the higher-education council for especially harsh (and counterproductive) treatment, is singling out an agency with statutory reporting responsibilities to the General Assembly as well as to the administration? That the governor wants the council's director appointed directly by himself rather than, as is now the case, by council appointees whose terms overlap from administration to administration? That Allen, unlike previous governors of both parties, did not consult the council - people, that is, who might actually know something about how best to go about it - before deciding on the higher-education line items he wanted to slash?
There's a context here, a pattern. Is it a coincidence that among Allen's first moves in office a year ago was replacing the respected heads of several agencies until then considered nonpolitical? That at the same time he now calls for emasculating the higher-education council, he wants to boost the budgets of his own secretariats?
The effect would be accumulation of gubernatorial power at the expense of competent management of state government. Since the governor is doing the proposing, it's reasonable to conclude the effect is also the intent.
by CNB