Man Bites Dog: Government Does Good

Conventional wisdom said no state could expand health insurance without breaking the bank. That big financial interests almost inevitably outfox state regulators. That city-county merger, however efficient and logical, is an impossible dream. That a computerized, statewide touch-screen voting system is too unproven to try.

But the "can't do's" aren't necessarily true. Governing magazine's Public Official of the Year awards, focused on heroic achievers in state and local government and presented at a gala dinner here last week, provided some dramatic evidence.

Take health care. Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a physician by profession, was honored for mixing strong fiscal prudence in handling his state budget with unremitting efforts to expand health insurance. By extending coverage for children from age 6 up to 18 (in families with incomes as much as three times the poverty-level incomes), plus health access funding for adults not eligible for Medicare, Vermont now has the broadest health care coverage of any American state.

Dean -- dropping into the Governing magazine dinner between fund-raisers for his Democratic presidential campaign -- told the crowd: "Frugality forced us to focus on prevention... We are the last industrialized nation on the face of the earth that does not guarantee all its citizens health care. I intend to change that."

Another Governing award went to New York's high-profile Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, whos gone after the securities industry for deceptive practices -- even wringing a $100 million settlement out of Merrill Lynch.

But a less-known crusader got recognized too. He's Robert Milligan, the ex-Marine lieutenant general elected Florida's state comptroller in 1994 against a united front of banking and securities industries that were afraid to cross the long-term Democratic incumbent.

Sweeping into Tallahassee with crisp military style, Milligan took a green-eye-shade-era office, automated and modernized it. And he eventually persuaded the state to eliminate his job by merging the posts of comptroller and state treasurer under a single chief state financial officer. Not to mention transferring oversight of financial and insurance industries to nonpartisan regulators.

Another dreamer/practitioner: Carol Marinovich, mayor of long-bedraggled Kansas City, Kansas. To streamline and trim government and break up an "old boy" governing ring, Marinovich determined that Kansas City needed to merge with surrounding Wyandotte County. A Democrat, she enlisted aid from moderate Republicans in next-door, affluent Johnson County to get the Kansas Legislature to OK a merger vote.

In 1997, voters approved the merger. The combined governments have cut their workforce, trimmed property taxes four years running, pushed neighborhood revival and economic development, and have been free of the periodic scandals that used to afflict both.

In Georgia, Secretary of State Cathy Cox, alarmed by the spectacle of Florida's 2000 election debacle, checked and found faulty procedures had actually spoiled 94,000 Georgia votes the same year. So she zealously campaigned to put entirely computerized touch-screen voting machines in every single Georgia precinct by the 2002 elections.

Against formidable odds, she got the money (special bonding of $54 million), persuaded officials of all 159 Georgia counties, got over 20,000 touch-screens installed, and deployed 13 staff members to demonstrate the machines in cities, suburbs and hamlets across Georgia. Election day result last month? "Not a single hitch," Cox boasts.

The other Georgia result: States coast-to-coast have lost any excuse not to pursue voting reform.

In another Governing award, San Jose's emergency planning director, Frances Edwards-Winslow, was recognized for creating preparedness plans in case of floods, earthquakes and chemical and biological emergencies, years before 9/11.

And though critics say governments are too ham-handed to master Internet site challenges, Pennsylvania's Charles Gerhards led in creating PAPowerPort, an Internet portal that may be the nation's best.

Atlanta Housing Authority chief Renee Lewis Glover got recognized for remaking her city's public housing projects, historically islands of poverty and crime, into decent townhouse communities where public housing residents live next door to middle-class families.

Career civil servant James Hankla successfully completed California's immensely complex Alameda Corridor project (a massive 10-mile trench for freightcars, 30 new bridges, elimination of 200 rail crossings). And in vivid contrast to Boston's Big Dig nightmarish delays and cost overruns, he did it on time, and on budget.

As against-the-grain as all those breakthroughs seem, the gargantuan budget crises facing states in 2003 will require even more miraculous political handiwork. Again, Governing found a precedent: the success of a bipartisan duo, Indiana House Speaker John Gregg, a Democrat, and the House Minority Leader, Republican Brian Bosma, in pushing through a highly controversial tax bill.

Neither man favored the Indiana proposal personally. But the measure did spread the pain of tax hikes, modernized a badly outmoded tax code, and had major business groups and the governor onboard. So Gregg and Bosma arranged for equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats to switch their votes at the last moment, and the measure passed.

So let's remember: legislative craftsmanship or bright policy innovation -- it can be done.