Beebe: No Cabinet meetings on agenda
Posted on Monday, July 28, 2008
Gov. Mike Beebe has ended a nearly four-decades-old practice of holding Cabinet meetings, a tradition dating back to former Gov. Dale Bumpers.
Each governor has his own style for managing the giant that state government has become, consisting of more than 27, 000 employees — not counting higher education — and involving more than $ 21. 1 billion a year. And Beebe’s choice not to sit down regularly with a Cabinet seems to have had no deleterious effect on the operation.
“We meet all the time with our agency heads,” said Matt DeCample, Beebe’s spokesman. “Individual meetings were all we really needed. We didn’t need to sit everyone down in a room together and call it a Cabinet.”
Still, there hasn’t been any formal decision to abolish a Cabinet, Beebe aides said.
Beebe spokesman Grant Tennille said just because Beebe has yet to convene a Cabinet, “that doesn’t mean he’ll never call a Cabinet meeting.”
The use of Cabinet meetings by Arkansas governors can be traced back to Bumpers, who assembled his agency heads for a monthly meeting after he persuaded the Legislature to reorganize state government so that more than 60 state agencies were grouped into 13 departments.
“We discussed things that related to everybody,” said Bumpers, governor from 1971 to 1975. “I didn’t force every- body to listen to everybody else’s problems.”
Bumpers, a Democrat, said he felt that the meetings functioned as morale boosters and brainstorming sessions.
One meeting in particular stands out in his memory.
“I had put out an order: no drinking during the noon hour,” he said. “Later, I walked into [a Little Rock restaurant ] and you could hear glass breaking all over the place.”
The Cabinet approach also would give governors new to government an opportunity to learn about the government they’re leading. Bumpers held no state office before becoming governor. Beebe was a senator 20 years and attorney general four prior to becoming governor.
David Pryor’s administration, 1975-79, also used a Cabinet system. Pryor said the concept was still relatively new. Pryor found it “very productive.”
His Cabinet would go on retreats to discuss issues like a burgeoning prison population and to kick around ways to keep from raising taxes during a recession in the early part of his term, said Pryor, a Democrat. Pryor had served as a state representative and three terms as a U. S. representative before becoming governor.
One Cabinet meeting stands out, he said.
“A young woman from DFA [the state Department of Finance and Administration ] gave a presentation on computers, which no one knew very much about back then. It was mind-boggling at the time. They were just beginning to install them for tax returns and driver’s licenses. She said, ‘ I’m going to explain this so even the governor will understand, ’” he recalled.
Pryor said he found convening a Cabinet to be a good way to get a “cross-fertilization” of ideas.
“It was awful good for DFA to know what state prisons were doing, for instance. It was a good opportunity for the right hand to know what the left hand was doing,” he said.
Bill Clinton, who had been attorney general for only two years before he became governor, also convened Cabinet meetings on a regular basis, said former Clinton chief of staff Betsey Wright, although it wasn’t every month.
Clinton, a Democrat, would call his Cabinet members together to educate them on his policy agenda.
“We wanted all of the group to feel like they were part of the group in the policies that he was pushing,” Wright said. “It was also a chance for them to interact as a team.”
But, Wright said, “there are other ways to accomplish that,” noting that there isn’t any constitutional or statutory definition of a Cabinet.
Former Democratic Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, who had previously served as attorney general, said he couldn’t recall having many Cabinet meetings, preferring to meet with individual agency directors.
“There are three or four agencies that are involved in 90 percent of the issues,” Tucker said. “DFA [Department of Finance and Administration ], DHS [Department of Human Services ] ... I’d meet with those people regularly.”
Small groups are often more effective than large gatherings for getting things done as governor, Tucker said, and Beebe’s practice “sounds pretty similar to what I did.”
Regular Cabinet meetings returned under former Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican, who gathered the heads of more than 40 departments, boards and commissions at least monthly in the Governor’s Conference Room in the state Capitol. He was lieutenant governor for three years before ascending to the governor’s office to fill the vacancy created when Tucker resigned after being convicted in federal court in 1996 of mail fraud and conspiracy.
The Huckabee Cabinet also went on a planning retreat at least once a year at a state park, said Rex Nelson, who was Huckabee’s communications director.
The Cabinet system came in handy after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 when Louisiana residents began to arrive in Arkansas.
Huckabee believed that it was important for agency chiefs to get to know one another. And “it’s an opportunity for a governor to outline his broad agenda for what he wanted state government to do,” Nelson said.
Still, he added, “Every governor is going to govern differently.”
Cabinets are a function of a governor’s personality, said Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College, but their effectiveness can be hamstrung by sheer numbers.
“Bumpers really prided himself on having shrunk the number of agencies and his arguments for reorganization about a more coherent way of thinking about state government,” Barth said. “But soon after Bumpers, state government begins to grow again, really quickly.”
Cabinets can foster camaraderie, and undoubtedly did in the 1970 s, but “that was a relatively brief period of time to have... effective, coherent” meetings, he said.
Now, there are at least 221 state agencies, boards and commissions, not counting the Highway and Transportation Department or Higher Education institutions, according to the Office of Personnel Management at the Department of Finance and Administration.
“The problem is how are they really going to get to know one another in any way that gets beyond the surface,” Barth said.
Richard Weiss, director of the Finance Department, has worked in state government since 1970. He has been at a Cabinet-level position since Clinton was governor in the 1980 s.
“Huckabee was the first one to really have regular meetings,” Weiss said. The other governors, while they did have Cabinets and called them together, didn’t do so as frequently.
Another longtime Cabinet member, Richard Davies, director of the Department of Parks and Tourism, said he’s never had any problem with reaching Beebe’s ear when he needs it.
“The thing I miss is getting to know some of the other people in state government and what they do,” Davies said.
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