By John Brummett

This dust-up over the vehicles in state government and their occasional personal use, while hardly a major component of the state budget, is worthy public dialogue in that it is symptomatic of three chronic and nagging maladies.

One is the innate personal political defensiveness that gets in the way of worthy policy introspection.

Gov. Mike Beebe got quoted in a most distressing fashion the other day on the front page of the statewide daily. Jim Keet couldn’t have paid for a better full-page ad.

The governor said the number of vehicles in state government was not a problem and that he leaves that to state agencies. He said the size of the fleet hadn’t grown much on his watch, or nearly as much as it grew under his predecessor, Mike Huckabee.

But it is a problem if a single tax-receiver uses a single taxpayer-provided vehicle unnecessarily, especially if mainly to drive between home and the office.

And seeking refuge in the behavior of one’s predecessor is a diversion. That predecessor is gone to Florida and a Fox studio and Sarah Palin’s national political shadow. Surely he is not our ethical or proprietary baseline, nor should he be installed as any kind of benchmark for fiscal responsibility.

This is as if Beebe crushed half his office’s computer hard drives and defended it by saying Huckabee crushed all of his.

The second symptomatic condition is the inertia by which things get done in state government — because, you know, that’s the way we’ve always done them.

An agency that has money for a vehicle in one budget cycle tends to get that money carried over for the next year.

Then, if the vehicle gets some miles on it, the agency merely has to report to state fiscal agencies on the need to purchase a replacement — this need substantiated and vouched for, of course, but mostly by citing the fact that the agency always had a car before and therefore still needs a car.

Many of these cars, even most, are indeed appropriate.

Field auditors working for the state Finance and Administration Department, going from place to place to do what their job requires, meaning audits in the field, don’t have permanent office stations and work entirely out of their cars.

Fine. Swell. Let us hope that these field audits find and impose efficiencies helping to pay for the cars. But that’s no remote justification for every car, or every pickup, or even every dump truck at the high-and-mighty state Highway and Transportation Department.

That brings us to our third and final symptom of our chronic malady.

It is that the governor is powerless over many of these vehicles because we’ve intentionally set up a state government that saps him of strength and dissipates responsibility and authority.

It does that by bestowing constitutional independence on vast segments. So the governor can say, look, most of these vehicles that have been counted in the press belong to the Highway Commission, which is independent of me, and the Game and Fish Commission, which is independent of me, and colleges and universities, which are largely independent of me.

There are 1,492 taxpayer-provided vehicles in the political fiefdoms known as our colleges and universities. One can only wonder how many vehicles it takes to get English and math and science taught.

Over the decades we’ve decided in our pervasive cultural suspicion of centralized power that it’s best to break up state government for fear of corruption by the governor.

It’s nonsense. The way to deal with a corrupt governor is to defeat him at the polls and indict him at the grand jury, not make vast amounts of state government independent of his authority and responsibility.

Anyway, the Legislature has appropriation authority over these otherwise independent agencies, and the governor, this one, anyway, has great influence on the Legislature. Now we even have fiscal legislative sessions every year.

There’s nothing except an absence of nerve preventing the governor and Legislature from holding up a Highway Commission spending bill until poring over it with eagle eyes to look at the number of dump trucks and cherry pickers and desk jockey’s commuter cars.

We need to get in under the hood, so to speak.

After we get finished with the vehicles, maybe we could start on the smart phones.

——-
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.