Governor a Trump supporter, not surrogate

Gov. Asa Hutchinson

Gov. Asa Hutchinson

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Wednesday was in “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” mode, and seemed comfortable with it.

The day before, he and five other Republican governors had a private meeting with their party’s presumptive nominee in Trump Tower.

Donald Trump is not Hutchinson’s ideal choice. He endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Earlier this year, he told National Public Radio, “I do not see (Trump’s) discussion of issues as serious. The words are frightening – how you’re going to build a wall, how you’re going to have Mexico pay for it. What does this mean?” When Trump said a judge should step down from a lawsuit against Trump University partly because his parents are from Mexico, Hutchinson issued a statement saying, “Criticizing and trying to disqualify a judge because of the judge’s ethnic heritage is antithetical to everything that is true and good about America.”

But now he’s supporting him. Why? Because they’re both Republicans, and because he’s better than the alternative, Hutchinson said.

“The framework that will take place under Mr. Trump is totally different than the framework that will take place under a President Clinton,” he said. “Elections are team efforts, and just because you don’t agree with the last play called by a quarterback doesn’t mean you’re going to stop blocking. …

“I have no doubt but that the team that I’ve aligned myself with for multiple decades is the one that I feel most comfortable with and will provide the best direction and security for the United States of America.”

Hutchinson did not seem torn about supporting Trump. When he started in politics, Republicans in this state were rare breeds and, occasionally, odd ducks, so this is not the first time he’s had to cast a less than enthusiastic vote. Believing your party is best for the country is not putting party over country.

Still, there are limits. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said after the Trump Tower meeting that the governors would be “surrogates” for Trump.

“He was speaking for himself there,” Hutchinson said. Asked if he would campaign for Trump, he said, “In a serious vein, there’s a lot to be done here in Arkansas in the fall, but this election’s important, so we’re just going to take that a step at a time.”

Other Arkansas Republican officials? During the campaign, some legislators held a press conference endorsing Rubio, while others did the same for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. There was no group photo op for Trump. But, like Hutchinson, they’re part of a team, and they don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president, so, whether they like Trump or not, most will get in line.

But most is not all, and we still have a secret ballot. Most Republican officials picked that party because they want to shrink government and defend certain traditional values. Trump doesn’t talk much about shrinking government. He also once wrote in “The Art of the Comeback”: “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.”

So some members of the party of family values may leave that race blank in the voting booth. Or they might cast their secret ballot for the Libertarians, who have nominated two credible former Republican governors, New Mexico’s Gary Johnson for president and Massachusetts’ William Weld for vice president.

It’s not only Republicans who are divided. Clinton only recently clinched the Democratic nomination campaigning against Bernie Sanders. She must try to unite her party, too.

But Republicans have more to lose. Of the 34 U.S. Senate seats in play this year, 24 are occupied by Republicans. While both Trump and Clinton have historically high unfavorable numbers, Trump’s are in the stratosphere. In a recent ABC News poll, 71 percent don’t like him and 55 percent don’t like her. So one of two things seems most likely to happen. First, Trump inspires millions of new voters, and the math works out in his favor, just as it did in the primaries. Or, it’s possible that Republicans as a party suffer a historic defeat up and down the ballot.

Unless something weird happens – and, boy, this would be the year – Trump will win Arkansas. Hutchinson and most Republican elected officials will support him with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Whether they like him or not, they’ll decide they’ve gotta do what they’ve gotta do.

Related: Trump played checkers and they played chess – in a checkers year

How two sisters and a cup of coffee changed a school

Tyler Cope, 17, already has her certified nursing assistant license.

Tyler Cope, 17, already has her certified nursing assistant license.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Pea Ridge High School senior Tyler Cope, 17, was a waitress. Now, she’s a certified nursing assistant making $11 an hour. More importantly, she’s well on her way to a good-paying future in nursing. Thirty of her fellow students also have CNA licenses, while others are learning skills in other career fields.

Cope and her fellow students have that opportunity partly because of two sisters and a cup of coffee. The sisters both were carhops at a local Sonic, where Rick Neal, then the high school principal, would stop. One had been a good student and earned a high school diploma. The other had dropped out. Both were working the same job making $8 an hour, which bothered him.

“We’ve gotten (students) to a point of handing them that diploma and saying, ‘Head on out the door. You’re good. You’re good to go,’” Neal said. “But we’ve never really given them a true vision of where they can possibly go.” Continue reading →

Fixing Arkansas’ life-and-death department

Cindy Gillespie By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The quickest route to saving the state millions of dollars may be the $119,000 extra it’s spending on one of its new employees.

That’s how much more money new Department of Human Services Director Cindy Gillespie is earning than her predecessor. He was making $161,038. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, with the support of the Legislature, bumped her salary to $280,000.

This was done because DHS is an important agency, and Gillespie has an impressive resume. The department spends $8 billion of your money and employs 7,000 people. It serves 1.2 million Arkansans through a variety of programs, many of which provide expensive services literally dealing with life and death: Medicaid, which serves disabled people and senior citizens living in nursing homes; the private option, which provides health insurance to lower income Arkansans; and the state’s foster care system, which serves more than 4,900 children. Gillespie was one of Mitt Romney’s health care advisors when he was governor of Massachusetts and, before that, she helped Romney rescue the financially troubled Salt Lake City Winter Olympics held in 2002.

When Gillespie started leading DHS about three months ago, her first act was to determine how big a mess the department was. She found during a 60-day review that its 10 divisions operate independently. Because of that, in many areas the department has had no central vision, while the director hasn’t been able to manage things properly or even to easily find out what’s going on. Because 10 divisions are buying things, the department hasn’t coordinated purchases or taken advantage of its economies of scale to get better deals with vendors. Each division is in charge of its own technology, meaning the department has hundreds of systems, with most tech duties outsourced to vendors.

Gillespie told legislators this week that the department is canceling contracts worth $174 million over the next seven years. Some of those may serve legitimate needs, and DHS may return to those vendors. But a change has to occur because in many cases, the state has been renewing contracts year after year without really determining if they were still needed and if they were written to serve the state’s best interest.

The reason it hasn’t changed before? “The easy path is just to keep it going,” she said.

Moreover, Gillespie has taken over an agency where morale is not great. The department’s turnover rate is 22 percent, which means, at any given time, more than one in five positions is in the process of being filled or is being staffed by someone new. That’s especially bad because half of the department’s employees are directly involved in patient care. Because each division manages its own human resources, there’s no department-wide strategy for hiring people and advancing them along career pathways. Sometimes there are problems with the job duties, such as the foster care caseworker who spends 30 hours a month making copies instead of helping children. Pay is lower than it should be – though, let’s be honest, state employees have benefits such as retirement that few others enjoy these days.

So now Gillespie is trying to fix the problems. As of July 1, about four months after she started the job, DHS will be reorganized. Instead of the divisions each doing their own thing, seven shared offices will each handle a major responsibility for the entire department – one to hire, one to buy things, one to handle technology, etc. A new finance office has already committed to find $25 million in savings this first year. When it’s done, she expects DHS to hire fewer people but make them better at their jobs and pay them more.

When the state hired Gillespie, it invested a little money in someone who’s going to run government more efficiently, like a business. Some people are really good at doing really consequential things, and sometimes, you get what you pay for.

That reality doesn’t always make sense, like when the state’s highest paid employee is a college football coach who makes $4 million a year. But it is the world we live in, which is why someone who can reorganize the state’s life-and-death department in four months should make at least 7 percent of that amount.

Related: What exactly is the private option?

Casinos among best bets to make the ballot

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Where Arkansans practice pure democracy – we make the laws rather than elected officials doing it – is in the ballot issues. This year, those led by citizens could be a lot more interesting than those referred by the Legislature.

Here are some of the issues being proposed by citizens: casinos, medical marijuana, gay/transgender rights, term limits, limiting damages in medical lawsuits, campaign finance reform.

Here’s what you’ll be voting on courtesy of lawmakers: letting the governor retain his or her powers when out of state; increasing the terms of county officials to four years; and expanding the ability of local governments to fund economic development projects. Those are important, but no one ever got into a fight over the governor’s out-of-state powers. Well, maybe they did on Facebook.

When citizens try to place a measure on the ballot, the important first hurdle they must overcome isn’t gaining popular support. It’s having enough money to collect signatures and fight potential lawsuits. A proposed constitutional amendment requires 84,859 signatures. An initiated act, which creates a law, requires 67,887. To reach those kinds of numbers, it really helps if you can pay people to walk the streets with clipboards. So if you want to know which of those issues actually will make the ballot, look at the ones where backers who already have money are trying to make more of it.

At first glance, that would include the casino initiative. A group of investors wants to build three casinos, one each in Washington County (Fayetteville-Springdale); Miller County (Texarkana); and Boone County (next door to Branson). Attorney General Leslie Rutledge has certified the amendment’s popular name and title, so now it’s in the signature-collecting phase.

This will be the latest of many efforts to bring casinos to Arkansas. Most if not all of the backers of this amendment have been involved in one or more of those previous efforts. So far, those have always failed, either by not gathering enough signatures or not withstanding a legal challenge of some sort. Asa Hutchinson, then a private attorney representing the secretary of state’s office, helped keep one such effort off the ballot in 2012.

The arguments have been the same since Mississippi rolled the dice with its first casino in Tunica in 1992. Opponents point to the human and societal costs that casinos cause – the lost money, the addiction, the broken marriages. They call it “gambling.” Supporters say casinos already exist across the state border, so Arkansas may as well have some fun and create the jobs and tax revenue. They call it “gaming.”

And on the third side are Oaklawn and Southland, which race horses and dogs on the side while operating their own casinos. Thanks to a 2005 law, these feature “electronic games of skill” with digital versions of playing cards and dice. They don’t want competition and will spend their own money to fight it – on lawyers to try to keep it off the ballot, and on a political campaign if they can’t. In a good example of “politics makes strange bedfellows,” they work in parallel with family values groups to defeat the casino initiatives. So far, they’re all undefeated.

As usual, this year’s casino proposal would bestow on its backers a permanent monopoly enshrined in the Arkansas Constitution, which is a pretty good deal if you can get it. They and only they, or their designees, could operate these three casinos forever, with no one allowed to compete with them unless they also pass a constitutional amendment.

What else? A proposal limiting medical lawsuit damages has a good chance of making the ballot for the same reason that the casino gambling measure does: People with money would be able to make more money. Under that standard, the term limits measure – it would tighten legislative terms to 10 years – faces an uphill climb, but it does have a passionate group of supporters who’ve been working for a while. Medical marijuana has some momentum as a concept but not the financial muscle, and supporters are divided into competing camps.

What ultimately will make the ballot? The three referred by the Legislature are the only sure bet, but you could roll the dice on the casinos and a couple of others.

Maybe we should just turn it into a museum

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Some things in government are hard, such as providing health care to 250,000 poor Arkansans, maintaining the state’s highways without raising taxes, or taking care of 4,900 foster kids. What should not be hard is maintaining a house.

Yet here we are again, spending more than a million dollars on that old place where the state’s chief executive lives – the Governor’s “Mansion.”

The house is once again making headlines after a law passed in the recent special session turned the Mansion Commission from a governing body that makes decisions into merely a consultant, and gave the governor the ability to dismiss any commission member. He already appoints them.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette began asking questions and was given a tour of the Mansion. It leaks, there are plumbing and wiring issues, and the reporter could smell the remains of rat urine in the governor’s private office. There’s been some disagreement between the first lady and the Mansion Commission about the condition of the house, about the decor, and about the number of public events in the adjoining Great Hall, by far the nicest structure on the grounds.

So now the state will spend $1.1 million next year for maintenance and remodeling as well as expenses that are less than necessary. The original grant application of $1.4 million included a sculpture on the grounds that first lady Susan Hutchinson wants to hang at a cost of $128,000, as well as a 72-inch television and a private washer and dryer for the first family. They currently use the same ones the staff use. Because the grant was for less than what was requested, the list will be pared.

Does all this sound familiar? You might recall that, in 2000, then-Gov. Mike Huckabee and wife Janet moved a triple-wide onto the grounds while $1.4 million in upgrades were done to the house. That triple-wide produced a lot of jokes as well as an invitation for the Huckabees to appear on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.

There’s some he-said, she-said to this latest story, and I’m leaving out a lot of details that you can find elsewhere. Reasonable people can disagree, especially when they don’t have all the information.

What’s pretty clear is that, over less than two decades, the state is spending $2.5 million on a house that has been a problem since it was built – in 1950, which makes it not much older than many houses in Arkansas. It looks big from the outside, but the actual upstairs living quarters are not, and there’s not much privacy when events are occurring in the Great Hall. Other governors before the Hutchinsons have complained about problems with basic maintenance such as wiring and water leakage. My wife worked there in 1998 and recalls her downstairs computer flickering followed by a frustrated Janet Huckabee exclaiming from upstairs that she was just tying to blow-dry her hair.

So if this were a car, we’d call it a lemon.

Maybe we should challenge the assumption that the first family should live in a house funded by the taxpayers, maintained by the government, beset with politics, and shared with everyone. Until 1950, governors were responsible for their own dwellings. The state doesn’t provide free living quarters for other officials; some congressmen have slept in their offices in Washington, D.C. Some states don’t even have a governor’s mansion.

It’s tempting to write that perhaps the state should knock down the house and keep the Great Hall. The Governor’s Mansion isn’t the White House. It’s not that old, it’s not an office building, and it’s not the center of Arkansas politics. That would be the Capitol, which despite being twice as old, works just fine.

Two other solutions are probably better options: Gut the thing and fix it up right, or turn it into a museum like another public building that outlived its original purpose, the Old State House. Maybe the governor should work hard during the day and then come home to, well, a home.

It’s proving unnecessarily challenging to maintain a public building of which the occupants are temporary while respecting those occupants’ privacy and well-being. This is a problem that can be solved without a special legislative session. Arkansas is not wealthy, but also not destitute. The governor and his/her family should not live like royalty, but they should have a nice house – if necessary, their own.