Did y’all see this in The State today:
Gov. Nikki Haley’s top staffers will be paid more than their Sanford-era predecessors, according to salary data released by Haley’s office Thursday.
But Haley’s staff will cost taxpayers less than former Gov. Mark Sanford’s staff because it will have fewer staffers, spokesman Rob Godfrey said….
Haley’s 16-person staff will be paid a total of $1.07 million, $71,000 under its state-set budget. According to the current state budget, Sanford’s office was authorized to have 36 employees, paid a total of $1.2 million.
Haley’s chief of staff, Tim Pearson, is the largest beneficiary, according to the records. He will be paid a salary of $125,000 a year. Sanford’s chief of staff, Scott English, now chief of staff at the state Education Department, earned $98,000….
Hey, I’m all for it, generally speaking. I get sick and tired of governors and others in important positions pandering to voters by being cheapskates in hiring staff. They get what they pay for, and the quality of governance suffers as a result.
When you don’t pay enough, you get green political hacks who bring very little to government service. To me, the 125k Nikki plans to pay Tim Pearson seems about right — respectable, but not too exorbitant for SC. Whether Pearson himself is actually worth it, or a, well, political hack who’s being rewarded for his service, remains to be seen. I don’t know him well enough at this point to say. (And what few thoughts I have about him I’ve already shared.) But Trey Walker I know, and I’m pretty confident he will earn his $122,775.
As for chief of staff, the salary itself seems about right, whether Pearson is the right guy or not. The goal should be to hire somebody who really knows how to get things done, someone of experience and talent. Someone like, for instance, Fred Carter — the Francis Marion University president, and Mark Sanford’s first chief of staff. In my 24 years of covering SC government and politics, I don’t think I’ve run into anyone who understands it all better than Fred. And while the kind of people you would want could command more in the private sector, the salary levels Nikki is offering would at least allow them to serve for a time without having to sell their homes.
Now, am I happy about everything in this announcement? No. Having fewer employees than the famously parsimonious Mark Sanford, essentially a do-nothing governor, hardly seems like a laudable goal. But at the same time, with the current budget crisis, it’s hardly a great time to be increasing the governor’s budget for staff. This governor will be presiding over more deep budget cuts throughout government. She has to share that austerity.
Here’s the fulcrum for me as to whether this is a good move overall or not: If the new gov is doing this (lowering the overall staff budget) as a pragmatic reaction to the current situation, fine. If she’s doing it to please her Tea Party crowd, or to pursue some abstract, arbitrary, ideological notion such as “shrinking government” just for the sake of doing so, then it’s destructive. In the long run, South Carolina should spend more on gubernatorial staff, not less. The governor’s office has always been too weak and ineffective; it needs to be beefed up, eventually, to better serve South Carolina. When we get around to giving our governor the same sort of authority other governors have, he or she will need adequate staff to wield that power effectively. OTHER parts of government need to be reduced or eliminated (such as the Budget and Control Board), and a lot of those functions should move into an expanded governor’s office.
But that’s the long run. For now, it’s laudable both to pay people enough to get good people — as long as it’s not just to reward one’s campaign staff (and her senior staff is NOT just campaign cronies) — and to keep the overall budget now, as long as it’s a pragmatic response to hard times and now a blindly ideological move.
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Good points Brad, but your enduring “power struggle” crusade shows up.
Your Point One: “When we get around to giving our governor the same sort of authority other governors have, he or she will need adequate staff to wield that power effectively.” Your Point Two: “OTHER parts of government need to be reduced or eliminated (such as the Budget and Control Board), and a lot of those functions should move into an expanded governor’s office.”
The inherent conflict between Point One and Point Two revolves around whether Point One’s “adequate staff’ is welded to Point Two’s “should move” into a larger gubernatorial hierarchy.
A governor’s office expanded in power is not tantamount to a larger workforce in the governor’s office. First, an aside: The current flawed strategy seems to be to drive out some very, very good staff there so we can nickel and dime on the administrative (vs. executive) salaries and hope to achieve the difference by replacing some line-level staff whose energy and excellence have made it work over the last eight years with an amalgamation of willing but clueless volunteers. Jenny Sanford famously is said to have said that she and Mark could run the place with a bunch of interns — which is why wily Fred Carter began openly counting down the last six months of his one-year commitment to Sanford.
Clearly there is an impulse to group functionally like-missioned agencies. Judge Byar leaves the treatment-oriented successes at Juvenile Justice to head up the warehouse-mission of Corrections, with orders to merge them functionally if not administratively, along with adult Pardons and Paroles and the Juvenile Parole Board. The outlines are similar in the form of the DHHS director imported from Louisiana and the new Hawaii DSS chief. Also, moving DAODAS onto vacant space at DMH.
Nikki appears to be stumbling to the mega-agency concept Jimmy Carter put into place in Georgia in the early 70s. Will our 150 or so state agencies become a half dozen or so super agencies?
A handful of super agency heads (dukes and duchesses) would transmit the governor’s orders and set up work plans so progress could be reported back.
Much of the governor’s office is the Office of Executive Planning and Programs – and most of these offices could be shifted OUT to program/service agencies. Most were moved into the governor’s office as part of Campbell’s restructuring when there was no convenient place to put these small, previously independent agencies.
Many are oversight or review agencies – Guardian ad litem, ombudsman, veterans, and energy – that receive a lot of constituent complaints. Where South Carolina is truly deficient is addressing people’s problems. Millions have been spent on computer systems that allow bureaucrats to endlessly forward citizen discomfort. Perhaps thought could be given to building within the new department of administration a first-class constituent service effort.
After all, if citizens are not being served, if they are being mistreated, government is more than likely to be either paying directly for some or all of those unhappy endings, or paying the offenders though other state contracts. A truly good and accountable administrative effort would quickly determine if citizens’ complaints reflect isolated conditions or are reflective of the true way that someone is doing business with the state. Out tax dollars should be withheld from businesses that mistreat the citizens who pay those taxes.
At any rate, what we do not need is a governor’s office that is numerically greater. What we are overdue for is one that is even more efficient and far, far more effective. A smaller Cabinet backed up by a small cadre of trained and experienced problem-solving staff that forces answers from Cabinet agencies is what is needed. The governor’s office is not just a few square feet in the State House and several floors in the Hampton and Brown buildings. It is and has been spread out over dozens of agencies and hundreds of thousands of square feet throughout our state. This demands a brain.
Thanks for your well-informed comments, old man, but I’m not sure why you think those two statements of mine were inconsistent. In fact, they were closely related points.
You’re right that in a properly, rationally organized government, some of the functions now in the governor’s office would leave it. But without doing an FTE-by-FTE analysis, I’m making a reasonable assumption that a governor in charge of all of the executive branch, rather than merely a third of it, would in the end need more human infrastructure for dealing with that.
In other words, I haven’t done a count. I’ve just said, as a way of expanding upon my point that shrinking the governor’s office is not inherently a laudable goal, that I can foresee circumstances likely to lead to the need for MORE staff, rather than less. And one such circumstance is this: A governor with the responsibility to do more is likely to need more help doing it. Again, I haven’t done a time-and-motion analysis, I’m merely making a reasonable assumption in trying to illustrate the point that it is wrong to assume that shrinking that office is naturally and always a good thing (which I fear an ideologically motivated person might assume).
In a proper Cabinet system, of course, most of the administration of an agency would reside at the agency itself, with only the director reporting to the governor. But there are some broad, administrative functions that are not a part of specific agencies that would logically end up in the governor’s office. And thinking about that naturally led to my mentioning the Budget and Control Board. If any agency now existing has staff that would logically end up in the governor’s office if it were dissolved, that one seems most likely.
So to me, one statement followed perfectly well upon the other. They were complementary. Or supplementary (depends on the angles — a little math joke there).
By the way, it’s “Power Failure,” not “power struggle.” But thanks for remembering it. It was a relevant thing for you to bring up, because the reason the project was called that was that it described a situation that was structured to prevent power from being wielded effectively in response to the will of the legitimate source of political authority, the people of SC. A bit oblique, perhaps, but I liked the name better than any other I came up with during that week or so in 1991 when the launch date was coming up for the project, which we had been working on for months, and I still didn’t have a title. It made sense within the context.
Oh, and I liked your point about Jenny Sanford’s comment. Indeed, she and Mark were likely to think in those terms because to a great extent, few people with more experience and judgment than an intern were likely to want to work for them. As you say, it didn’t take Fred long to realize he wanted out of there ASAP. Did he actually stay out the full year? I can’t remember now. But I suppose that, being Fred, if he promised to stay that long, we would have.