Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 14, 1995 TAG: 9501160065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER AND DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
Gov. George Allen knows life may get harder for the 36,000 low-income teen-agers he wants to remove from Medicaid. He realizes jobs don't yet exist for up to 48,000 welfare recipients who would lose benefits after two years, under his reform proposal.
He simply has faith that things will work out for them.
In an interview Friday, the governor expressed an unshakeable conviction that whatever cuts he makes in government services, the private sector will step in on its own and do a better job.
It's all about "empowering people, trusting people and letting freedom and liberty work," Allen said in his office on a correspondingly warm, cheerful day.
The 42-year-old Republican was positively Reaganesque in his affable certainty that cutting taxes and shrinking government can't fail.
He smiled at a litany of statistics showing Virginia to be one of the lowest taxing and spending states in the nation. "You can use all those statistics you want ... I don't find it persuasive," Allen said.
What does persuade the governor is a philosophical belief that state government should curtail every role other than law enforcement, education and economic development.
This philosophy is leading him through a remarkable attempt to remake Virginia's proud, tradition-conscious government - an urge for change reflected in the decor of the governor's corner office. Allen has taken a stolid, old, Federalist-style room and made it look like Daniel Boone's parlor.
A boar's head, cow skull and elk antlers adorn the walls. Animal pelts are tossed over a wingback chair and a Chippendale couch. A deer hoof serves as a coat hook on the back of the door. On the mantel sit a stuffed armadillo and a small alligator head with a sign in its open jaws reading "Abolish Parole Now."
Allen's aggressive mark-making has rattled state Democrats, who dread the threat he poses to their tenuous hold on power in the legislature. He seems to relish the conflict.
But Allen played the partisan victim Wednesday night, delivering his state of the commonwealth speech from a conference room because the assembly was too mired in bickering to hold a joint session.
The speech was still on his mind Friday. He recited several passages almost verbatim in response to questions, and took nearly every subject back to his proposed "tax cut for working Virginia families."
Allen revealed what sounded like a growing skepticism about another major topic of the General Assembly session: riverboat gambling.
The governor said he would ask his staff to analyze a Florida study that suggests casinos merely take tourism dollars away from other attractions. "What would it do to our existing industries?" Allen wondered, calling the Florida dilemma one of economic "cannibalization."
He is willing to sign legislation setting up a statewide referendum on the issue, but reserved the right to speak out at some point and urged the General Assembly to "determine whether this is good for our economy."
Allen conceded that paying for his five-year, $2.1 billion tax cut package would be painful. The recommendation to drop about 36,000 low-income teen-agers from Medicaid, he said, "wasn't an easy choice ... It was a close call. But I felt it was more important to reduce the tax burden on Virginians."
He had no remorse about a proposed 25 percent cut in the Cooperative Extension Service, and said the drastic reduction doesn't contradict statements he made during the 1993 election campaign that "more governmental agencies should operate like the Extension Service."
The problem with the service, he said, is that it has wandered too far from its agricultural mission. Allen recalled hearing of a chef who needed some safety tips. "This guy thinks it's wonderful to have learned from a cooperative extension agent that you're supposed to heat meatballs to 160 degrees to kill bacteria," Allen guffawed.
The program cut Allen termed the hardest - "the closest of the close calls" - was decreasing funding by 27 percent for regional centers that help disabled people learn the skills they need to get jobs and live independently.
Again, though, Allen said free enterprise and volunteer groups would come to the rescue. "I trust people more than I trust government," he said.
It's a leap of faith that Allen believes Virginians are ready to take with him.
by CNB