Remaking Massachusetts Government

By Robert B. Reich
Old City Hall
May 8, 2002

Close your eyes and imagine a state government where a politically-connected “Director of Golf Operations” gets hired by the state during a budget crisis and in spite of a hiring freeze. A state government that lets suspiciously “fired” state employees collect “special pensions”-on top of their regular pension. Or how about a state government that gives its six-figure Turnpike boss a $57,500 raise after only two months on the job because of an outdated legal technicality on the books?

Now, stop imagining, open your eyes, and look at the state we’re living in. Because this state government is the one we currently live under. It’s an open secret that the government of Massachusetts has become home to patronage, nepotism, cronyism, featherbedding, and just plain waste.

When revenues are increasing and the forecast is rosy, the state government can get away with it. Political cronies can keep feeding from the trough and it barely gets noticed.

But now that vital services are on the chopping block and taxes are likely to rise, the people are starting to notice. And they’re fed up. They’re tired of what has sadly become business as usual on Beacon Hill.

It’s time for real reform.

Cleaning up this mess won’t be easy. And cleaning it up won’t by itself solve the budget crisis, even though millions of dollars can be saved.

But we must act - and act now. We can’t afford not to. Cleaning up Beacon Hill is also essential to restoring trust in government. And public trust is necessary if we’re going to get through this crisis. Most people don’t mind paying a reasonable amount of taxes if they think their dollars are being used wisely. But they resent the idea of their hard-earned tax dollars going down a political drain.

The problem isn’t with the dedicated people who work for the Commonwealth. Teachers, social workers, fire fighters, police officers, and other public servants are the everyday heroes of state government. They work hard to do their jobs well, often in difficult circumstances.

The problem is with the people who have run our government. The problem is a profound, pervasive, ongoing tolerance of the trough - an unwillingness to distinguish between what government should do for the people and what it too often does at the people’s expense to perpetuate a self-serving culture of waste and greed.

It is possible to improve the system and make government work. What’s required is resolve and determination. I managed a department of the federal government with an annual budget bigger than the Commonwealth’s. We had to downsize. We reduced staff by 12 percent through attrition, without laying anyone off. We came into office on the heels of a recession and in a time of record deficits. Our budget had to be cut. We had to do more with less. And we did it.

When I got there, the Labor Department, after a dozen years of Republican presidents, was a sleepy backwater. By the time I left, it had become a center of activism on behalf of working families. We successfully fought to raise the minimum wage, implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, fought against sweatshops, opened "one-stop" job-training offices all across the country, and pioneered new school-to-work programs so the next generation would be prepared for the new jobs of a new century.

Our agency streamlined procurement, sped up hiring and reduced paperwork. We took a creaky claims process for disabled workers and turned it around, saving taxpayers over 30,000 hours of work time a year. And we increased workplace safety by giving employers a 10 percent reduction in penalties if they agreed to fix a safety violation immediately.

The reforms paid off. We won awards for efficiency and innovation. But the real win was serving citizens better.

Here’s something I learned from the process: The public employees at the Labor Department wanted to do their jobs well, and because they were on the front lines, they were able to make connections and see solutions. They had lots of ideas about how we could work better and more efficiently, but no one had listened to them. I did. That’s where a lot of the management improvements started-from the bottom up.

I hired talented people. I insisted on competence.

As governor, I’ll do it again in Massachusetts - and I’ll do more.

We need a fundamental reform in the way Massachusetts government does business. This system has to be cleaned up -- so public employees can do their jobs more effectively, and the public can trust that their tax dollars are being used well. Especially now.

Let me outline four areas where reform is most needed, and tell you what I plan to do.

First, we must eliminate duplication and overlap.

There’s plenty to eliminate. For example, there are currently 12 agencies, under five secretariats, each handling an aspect of workforce training. Do the Departments of Transitional Assistance, Labor and Workforce Development, Education, Mental Health, Mental Retardation, the Division of Employment and Training, the Department of Economic Development, the Executive Office of Elder Affairs, Massachusetts Commission of the Blind, the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, the community colleges under the Board of Higher Education, and the Commonwealth Corporation really all need to have a hand in this? It is the classic case of too many hands in charge, too little accountability, and too few results.

It would be far more efficient to combine workforce training under a single State Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development, and that’s exactly what I’ll do as governor.

And we certainly don’t need two convention centers. As several business leaders have suggested, I’d sell the Hynes Convention Center when the new Convention Center in South Boston is completed in 2004. It doesn’t make sense for Massachusetts to compete with itself for much-needed convention and tourism business. We can take the profits from the sale-estimated at as much as $50 million-and use that to bolster our state finances and rebuild the rainy day fund. We can also use half of the $17 million dollars the state subsidizes the Hynes Convention Center each year for marketing the new South Boston Convention Center. And return the other half to state coffers.

Second, we must manage the public’s money far more carefully.

The problems on Beacon Hill go way beyond overlap and duplication. Our leaders aren’t minding the store. There are too many sweetheart deals, too much self-dealing, too many cozy relationships.

It’s time to reform the state pension system to abolish sweetheart retirement goodbye gifts for Beacon Hill politicians and their cronies. At least four former state legislators have received pensions despite the fact they were under age 55 at the time and didn’t qualify for them. Paul Cellucci, our former governor, does qualify, through a different route-30 years of public service before age 55. But he reached that threshold for a “special pension” by counting six years of being a $1500 a year part-time selectman. Part-time work shouldn’t be counted toward these lucrative deals, one of which is netting Mr. Cellucci $42,500 a year in addition to his six-figure salary as ambassador.

As governor, I will introduce legislation to eliminate these sweetheart pension deals altogether. Workers who devote their lives to public service should be rewarded with pensions at the end of their careers. But there is simply no reason why anyone should qualify for “special pensions”-a benefit rife with abuse-on top of their regular pensions.

Surely the Big Dig is Exhibit Number One on everyone’s list of oversight failures. Until just days ago, the Big Dig went three years without a quality-assurance manager. And it shows. If someone had been paying attention, a flawed ventilation system might not have been installed in the Ted Williams Tunnel. Substandard road sealant might not have been used in East Boston, and poor quality road surface overlay might not have been put down in South Boston. All of these mistakes could have been prevented.

Poor oversight invites fraud. Two months ago, Acting Governor Jane Swift cut the number of investigative staff who look into welfare fraud from 68 to five. The State has stopped investigating new reports of fraud, leaving the door open for cheaters. Investigators estimate that office brought in $3 to the state for every $1 it cost-which looks like a bargain to me.

The third imperative is to get money out of politics.

Influence peddling by deep-pocketed special interests corrupts our government. Everybody can see this except the Beacon Hill insiders. The Center for Public Integrity recently reported that in 2000, special interests spent nearly $48 million on lobbying activities in order to influence the government of Massachusetts. Last year, that figure rose to $53 million. There are more than three lobbyists for every legislator on Beacon Hill.

As governor, I will fight for legislation to ban lobbyist contributions altogether.

Currently, lobbyists are allowed to give candidates $200 per calendar year. That $200-multiplied by the hundreds of lobbyists listed in the inch-and-a-half thick guidebook at the Secretary of State’s office-is far too costly for the state. That’s because stacks of $200 checks in a Beacon Hill politician’s pocket can mean millions of dollars out of the state coffers at a time when we need it the most. We can’t allow corporate interests to buy the power to put their pet projects ahead of the public interest.

Beyond lobbyist contributions, we need to eliminate the contributions of public employees to the campaigns of those they work under. No state employee should feel pressured to contribute to their boss because their job might be at stake; no office holder should be tempted to use their public payroll to pad their campaign account. As governor, I will ban contributions from state employees to the political campaigns of those they work for.

I would also double-to two years-the “cooling off” period for state employees to become lobbyists. It’s wrong for lobbyists to buy their way in, and it’s wrong when politicians trade on their friendships and loyalties to benefit Big Business. We can’t have a revolving door between the State House and big lobbyists. A one-year prohibition isn’t enough, and as governor, I will increase it.

Perhaps most importantly, I will stand up for Clean Elections. When I entered the race in January, I wanted to run as a Clean Elections candidate-but the money wasn’t there. After a spate of SJC rulings, my good friend Warren Tolman was able to get funded-and cleaned out the Clean Elections bank in the process. Now, to meet its obligations to Warren and other legislative candidates, the state is auctioning off SUVs. It’s an embarrassment. We shouldn’t have to put property up for auction in order to fulfill the voters’ clear directive. As governor, I will take the lead on fighting for Clean Elections, and I won’t take no for an answer. The voters have demanded reform, and I will fight to get Big Money out of politics.

Fourth and finally, we must take on Beacon Hill’s culture of patronage.

There are too many jobs created especially to pay off political debts - like the $76,000 a year Massport post that Bill Weld invented for Jane Swift after she lost a political campaign in 1996. The job suddenly materialized when she needed it, and disappeared the instant she left it.

Immediately upon taking office, I will create an Anti-Patronage Strike Force. Its mission - with a tough timetable, the first three months of my administration - will be to root out all the make-work patronage jobs lurking in the recesses of state government. I want a list of specific positions-and I will eliminate them.

As an ongoing check, I will expand the charter of the state Inspector General to investigate make-work, no-show, and half-show jobs. Under my administration, the IG will have authority to determine whether job positions were created as paybacks for political supporters, report twice annually to the public on the findings, and refer cases to the State Ethics Commission.

I will also stand firm on cutting out patronage in the court system. The Pioneer Institute estimates that between 1998 and 2001, the Legislature created 382 unrequested positions for the courts. That cost the state $50 million-at the same time that cases requiring interpreters have stopped in their tracks and court personnel are being asked to take eight-day furloughs. This is a betrayal of the public trust - and a crude incursion into what should be an independent judiciary. As governor, I will veto any earmarking of specific positions not requested by the courts.

I will also charge the Anti-Patronage Strike Force with the task of drafting a plan to reform and expand our civil service system. Notwithstanding the valuable and vital work of most public employees, the current civil service system is deeply flawed. The citizens of Massachusetts deserve professional public employees who work hard to conduct the public’s business.

Currently 40 percent of Massachusetts’ state employees are not under civil service. Considering the current nature of the civil service system, some may think that is a good thing. But, it’s that 40 percent of the workforce outside the civil service system where the Beacon Hill crowd puts their patronage appointments. If we are ever going to stop patronage - that has to change.

In reforming the civil service system, I will ask the task force to specifically look at changing how we make appointments to the Civil Service Commission and improving the commission’s hearing process.

As a Boston Globe editorial noted two years ago, the Civil Service Commission is “timeworn at best, dysfunctional at worst.” The Reich administration will change that - we can, and we will, turn the Massachusetts civil service system into a model for the nation and a source of pride for state workers and our citizens.

As governor, I will also clean up the State’s independent agencies and authorities, like Massport and the Turnpike, which have become palaces of patronage and models of mismanagement. I’ll fight to implement the Carter Commission recommendations, many of which are included in House Bill 4996, currently stalled in committee. I support increasing the voice of local communities affected by the airport by adding two members to the Massport board, and limiting the present seven-year term of board members so that inefficient practices don’t become entrenched because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

I’ll expand on the Carter Commission’s recommendation for publicly-available "Sunshine Reports" at every Massport board meeting, detailing all requests from any political office-holder seeking the creation of a job or the hiring of an individual. In fact, I believe this is a valuable proposal for all state agencies, and as governor, I will issue an executive order requiring such disclosure.

Cynics will say that chronic waste, self-dealing, influence peddling, and patronage are so deeply ingrained in the culture of Beacon Hill that they can never be rooted out.

I say we have no choice but to try to root them out. The stakes are simply too high.

And I believe I have a good shot at succeeding, if given the chance. My experience is running one of the major departments of the national government and running it well - not as a career politician, and not “getting along by going along” with cozy arrangements that waste our prosperity in good times and erode the public trust all the time. I’m not part of the Beacon Hill culture that has bred cronyism and lax management.

During this campaign, I’ve been accused of wanting to invest more in our people - in smaller classrooms for our kids, better community colleges, early-childhood education, and affordable health care. And yes, I confess that’s true. These investments mark the path to long-term economic growth and fairness.

But we can’t do more than we can afford. Even after the recession is over -- even after the budget crisis has eased -- we will have to make better use of every tax dollar if we are to move forward.

It’s also a matter of public trust. Massachusetts is the cradle of our democracy, a place where Americans learned self-government. We deserve a government today that lives up to that heritage-a government as good and as decent, and also as competent, as frugal, and as levelheaded-as the people of this great state.

“The legitimate object of government,” Abraham Lincoln once said, “is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”

But when the object of government becomes political patronage, featherbedding, and personal dealing - government loses its legitimacy.

It is time for reform. The people demand it. The future depends on it. And I am determined to do it.

Fact Sheet:
Robert Reich's Plan for Remaking Massachusetts Government

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