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High
on the Hog
Flush
with higher taxes and a growing economy, the Warner
administration is expanding state government again.
Does Virginia really need a secretary and a
commissioner of agriculture?
At
least one good thing happened as a result of the
huge tax increase enacted at the 2004 special
session of the Virginia General Assembly.
Journalists no longer invariably refer to
state government as “cash-
starved."
Of
course, they still consider the Virginia Department
of Transportation to be “cash-starved.”
And it won’t take long for the new funding
to be soaked up by the bureaucracy and special
interests, who will soon be pointing to “funding
gaps” and “structural deficits” requiring yet
another transfusion of money from taxpayers’
pockets to the state treasury.
State
government has never stopped spending enormous
amounts of money on non-productive, wasteful and
ill-advised undertakings.
Despite Gov. Mark R. Warner’s insistence
that spending has been cut to the bone, state
government could stand considerable trimming.
Two
recent events serve to illustrate how far from lean
and mean the government really is.
Warner announced on September 24 that he will
appoint a person to fill the new position of
Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry six months
earlier than anticipated.
A few days later, his Secretary of
Technology, George C. Newstrom, announced that he
would be leaving.
The
two events served to remind us how much duplication
there is in state government.
At the rate
Virginia
is going, it will have a separate cabinet post for
every discrete segment of the economy.
The
functions these two new positions are assigned were
once handled by the Secretary of Commerce and Trade.
The administrative burden of the old position
(which continues to exist) was hardly overwhelming,
and the reason for splitting that position into
three cabinet positions was not to lighten the
management load of an overworked Secretary of
Commerce and Trade.
The
justification for the new positions — if indeed
there is a justification — was that both the high
technology industry and agriculture should have
their own high-level advocates reporting directly to
the governor and representing these sectors beyond Virginia. This is the
very reasoning that has caused governments
everywhere to grow out of control and into a
patchwork arrangement that defied effective
coordination.
Newstrom
countered the criticism that the position of
Secretary of Technology was redundant: “To me, it
is a ludicrous proposition that we would take away
one of the drivers of our economy.”
What’s ludicrous is that Newstrom believes
that the survival of Virginia’s high technology sector depends on the existence
of a governmental officer in Richmond.
The
real issue is whether the addition of new government
positions, along with their new offices, staff
support and travel budgets, provides any value to
taxpayers (as opposed to special interests)
exceeding their obvious and hidden costs.
This calls for hard analysis, not glib
rationalizations. Taxpayers
have yet to see such hard analysis.
Virginia
has had a Commissioner of Agriculture since 1877.
The department the commissioner oversees is
relatively small. The
legislation sponsored by the Warner Administration
and approved by the General Assembly didn’t
eliminate that position.
Instead, we now have that position and a
cabinet-level position — the Secretary of
Agriculture and Forestry.
Does
Virginia
really need both?
The
establishment of the Virginia Information
Technologies Agency in 2003 consolidated virtually
all information technology responsibilities in the
administrative head of VITA.
This leaves the Secretary of Technology with
little to do other than to promote research and Virginia’s “info-tech"
industry.
These
are merely examples of the approach to managing
taxpayers’ money that characterize state
government at the moment.
We can surely do better.
--
October 4,
2004
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