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

DATE: TUESDAY, January 10, 1995                   TAG: 9501120053
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ODD UNSPINNING FROM GOV. ALLEN

SPIN DOCTORS: Political campaigns have them. Large corporations have departments and divisions of them. And, for many years, they have been among the fastest-growing segments of Virginia's government. A public-information specialist, sometimes platoons of them, could be found on the staff of virtually every state agency.

As a rule, the public is better-informed as a result of their work - a vast outpouring of facts, figures, news releases, magazines, brochures, radio and TV spots purporting to tell state government's story. To a degree, the growth in their numbers is the result of Virginia's Freedom of Information Act.

But the proliferation in their ranks has not always ensured more open government. In some cases, it has served to shield top officials from public communications and accountability, and to distort governmental truth rather than subject it to the sunshine.

Gov. George Allen's plans to streamline and consolidate state government's public-information operations, part of his aim to trim state-government employment by 16,000, should be a very good thing.

Yet there is something odd about it all.

While the Allen administration has reduced the public-information staff of, for example, the Department of Motor Vehicles from 18 to four, he is beefing up the public-relations activities of his own Cabinet secretaries.

And while reducing the number of spin doctors could mean that government information is put out more forthrightly, unfiltered and unspun, by the public officials most responsible for and familiar with it, this may not be what Allen has in mind. The Cabinet officers, top-level political appointees, have been given almost exclusive authority for communications with anyone outside the administration.

Farther down the bureaucracy, lesser officials are under orders: Fill out a form reporting to their superiors all contacts with ... legislators. Legislators? If not an outright violation of state workers' rights to freedom of speech and association, it smacks of an intimidation tactic to make sure all hew to the administration line.

Most governors have sought, not surprisingly, to put the best possible light on their administration's words and deeds. But the implied leash on what a state employee can say to legislators suggests that Allen's desire for tight control is excessive.

The governor isn't the only official in town; members of the legislature, a coequal branch with the executive, also have a legitimate interest in what goes on in state government. So, come to think of it, do you and we.

by CNB