Governing Illinois:
In times like these,
we'll need
a governor
like we've never had before
Essay by Donald Sevener
Illustration by Mike Cramer
Talk about timing.
Illinois' next governor could hardly have picked a more auspicious occasion to move into the Executive Mansion. The state treasury runneth over. Jobs are up, welfare rolls down, school funding is rising, crime rates declining. If ever there were a time to just kick back and let the good times roll, this would seem to be it.
This isn't that time. Despite rosy news on virtually every front, Illinois will be poorly served if its next governor is complacent, timid or content with the status quo. Even in the unlikely event the economy continues to defy the gravitational pull of business cycles, there are worrisome trends, stubborn issues and persistent problems that call for a governor who can transcend politics as usual. Alan Ehrenhalt, an editor at Governing magazine, wrote recently: "To be a public official in a state capitol ... these days is to confront more and riskier choices than at any moment in recent history."
The times call not just for a new governor, but a new kind of governor.
The times call for a governor who is a powerful communicator. The bully pulpit is one of a governor's most versatile weapons, and one of the most neglected, certainly in recent times.
Our next governor will need to be able to educate, conciliate, mediate and motivate. He will need to give the bully pulpit a good workout.
Candidates win office by appealing to our basest instincts, expecting (justifiably) that fueling our fears of the other guy will be an effective campaign strategy. Governors, on the other hand, need to calm our passions, and temper our ignoble impulses and help us reason through our biases; they must teach us how to get along.
Illinoisans are well-acquainted with all the things that divide us - geographic differences, racial diversity, issues like education funding, crime, abortion, gun violence, welfare, transportation. We'll need a governor with the skill to bring us together.
Jim Nowlan, a former University of Illinois political scientist and policy analyst, says Illinois is among the states experiencing a "bumping into one another" phenomenon. Not only are urban areas clogged and suburban communities reaching farther into the countryside, but even rural areas feel the effects of running out of space.
There just isn't enough room for all of us, and we're increasingly at odds over competing interests. For example, Nowlan points to the conflict between rural residents and the owners of mega-hog farms, confrontation in metro areas between growth and no-growth advocates, strife over noise pollution, water pollution, even cellular tower pollution. "What we need is not a Solomon-type leader, but someone good at mediating sticky issues," he says. "We need someone who is thoughtful, reasonable and balanced rather than someone who is demagogic."
The next governor will need to convince us to be neighborly, even when we'd rather not - even, in fact, when we're not neighbors.
As if we didn't have enough to drive us apart, things could actually get worse. Certain population trends augur potential generational conflicts and perhaps increased ethnic tension. As we move into a new century, Illinois, like the rest of the nation, is getting older and more ethnically diverse.
As baby boomers begin to reach retirement age and the baby boom echo moves into adolescence, the two fastest growing segments of the population will be older people and younger people. Together, these trends produce a troublesome and expanding gap in what the Census Bureau labels the "dependency ratio" - the number of youth (under 20) and elderly (over 65) for every 100 people of working age. In 1995, there were about 71 people of "dependency" age for every 100 of working age; by 2025, the ratio is expected to rise to 80 people dependent on 100 workers.
As one of the hundred, are you ready to share the cost of schooling or the cost of medical care for nine more dependents? The next governor will need to educate us as to why we must.
The other major demographic trend may be even more ominous. In 1995, Illinois' population was 73 percent white; by 2025, it is projected to be 63 percent white. While the number of African Americans is expected to remain stable, the Hispanic population will nearly double by 2025 - rising by 1.2 million, to 17 percent of the population from 9.2 percent today.
Our record of easing the way for minorities into the economic mainstream is not an enviable one, either as a state or a culture. Minorities are underrepresented on all rungs of the educational ladder, from the ranks of high school graduates to the level of
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grad school admissions. They overpopulate our jails and prisons and welfare rolls.
One of the surest predictors of future economic success is one's level of educational attainment, and minorities, particularly Hispanics, lag significantly behind whites. For instance, the Census Bureau reports that in March 1997, 83 percent of whites over age 25 were high school graduates. In contrast, 75 percent of blacks and just 55 percent of Hispanics held a high school diploma. One in four whites had earned a bachelor's degree; but just 13 percent of blacks and 10 percent of Hispanics had a college degree. Meanwhile, affirmative action in the workplace, in governmental contracting and in college admissions is under attack.
The next governor will need to explain why such trends imperil our economic self-interest, and why they are wrong.
These are important messages, ones that would challenge the skills of even a Lincoln. So the next governor will have to learn to communicate to a broad constituency to win acceptance of (sometimes) unpopular ideas and to marshal public support for taking action. Equally important, he will need to communicate effectively to the more narrow congregation of lawmakers for essentially the same purposes.
The next governor will need to learn to listen well, to hear the concerns, fears, anxieties, expectations and hopes of people who put an important chunk of their future in his hands for the next four years. And because reading poll numbers is not the same as listening to people, he ought to get out of Springfield, or at least out of the Capitol, and meet folks in their workplaces, schools, homes, the neighborhood tavern, the mall, and sit down and shoot the breeze for an hour or two over a glass of iced tea. He needs to hear what we have to say.
Wisconsin's Gov. Tommy Thompson, often cited as one of the nation's more innovative public leaders, sat down to listen at a luncheon shortly after he became governor 12 years ago. The invited guests were welfare mothers who explained the difficulties of getting jobs and keeping them, difficulties like child care, transportation, adequate training. Their advice, plus that of people at similar luncheons Thompson holds every year, have helped him to fashion welfare reform measures that generally have been applauded and emulated across the nation.
The next governor will need to demonstrate a sense of detachment, or independence, so we can trust that he is taking our interest to heart, that is, the broad public interest, not that of narrow special interests or regional benefactors or partisan supporters that helped to get him elected. That used to be called statesmanship, a term little used today and practiced less.
The next governor should level with us, telling us not just what we want to hear but frankly what we need to hear. That means telling us no from time to time and explaining, plainly and candidly, what we can expect our government to do and what we need to do for ourselves.
A sense of humor also would help because we tend to trust someone who has the ability to laugh at themselves, and the agenda before us will be sobering enough without the governor taking himself too seriously.
The next governor should probably learn Spanish.
The times call for a governor who is a thinker - bold, inventive, visionary.
Jim Edgar has given us government by pilot program, often innovative and even progressive but usually small. As a result of fiscal exigencies and political personality, he's dabbled here and tinkered there, producing the likes of Healthy Moms, Healthy Kids for Medicaid mothers, Project Success for kids, Pre-Start for cons. His camera was always aimed for a close-up snapshot of a solution.
The next governor will need to think panoramic. Congress has handed states the authority to think big; to an increasing degree, the Statehouse is now where the action is. Last year Vice President Al Gore told the nation's governors that sometimes "our most effective good government initiative is to step aside and give you the freedom and flexibility to innovate and reinvent at the state level."
The pace of the "New Federalism" may have slowed as the enthusiasm for devolving federal programs to state governments has cooled somewhat in Washington. But there seems no turning back, and opinion polls show the public doesn't want to; its trust to solve problems lies in the state's - not the nation's - capital. Welfare reform has led the way, and now the public believes, by a 3-to-1 margin, that state and local governments can handle the issue better than the federal government.
Unleashed by Congress, and with the growing sanction of the Supreme Court, the New Federalism is handing governors the opportunity to shape policies with a freedom that is perhaps unparalleled and probably increasing. States have the chance to live up to the role, first envisioned by Louis Brandeis, of "laboratories of democracy."
The next governor will be challenged to "think outside the box," to examine old problems through a fresh lens. That has been the whole thrust behind the devolution of welfare to the states, the ability to fashion solutions that fit problems, conditions and opportunities unique to Illinois, or any other state. It took some fresh thinking to piece together reform of the Chicago schools three years ago, now heralded as a shining success and perhaps as a model for rethinking a host of other problems: environmental cleanup, transportation funding, health care, criminal justice.
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One way for the next governor to exploit the New Federalism in new ways is to think regionally. As detailed elsewhere in this and recent issues of the magazine, regionalism offers a chance to attack problems with innovative approaches.
Anthony Downs, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, writes that "the inherent conflict between the fragmentation of local governments and the regional nature of economic forces" begs for establishing regional institutions with authority, money and power. "Nearly all major problems in urban areas are regionwide in scope," Downs says, "and so cannot be solved by local governments acting independently. Yet in most U.S. metropolitan areas, there are no significant governing bodies with regional scope." Transportation is a metropolitan-wide issue; gang crime is no longer confined to inner cities; environmental pollution transcends geography; economic development defies political jurisdictions.
Downs' solution is for Congress to use the New Federalism as a mechanism to create metropolitan governmental authorities and devolve responsibility for solving problems to them.
A governor who is an out-of-the-box thinker wouldn't wait for Congress. He would just act.
The times call for a governor who is a doer. Jim Edgar is certainly no ideologue, and in fact resisted the more extreme ideological factions of his party. Pragmatism resonates well in Illinois; this is a get-things-done sort of place.
When Jim Edgar entered office at the dawn of the '90s, he faced a fiscal crisis so severe that the principal thing to get done was to restore solvency to the state's balance sheet. By the time the economy began to hum and there was money to do something, Edgar made reform of school finance the defining issue of his governorship and the object of big increases in spending.
Many problems persist, including reform of school finance.
Many of those problems affect kids. Despite diminishing welfare rolls, the number of persons under 21 who receive food stamps has climbed in each of the last three years. The percent of Illinois children living in poverty has stayed stubbornly above 20 percent every year between 1985 and 1995. Although Medicaid enrollments have declined for three straight years, one of every five children in Illinois still qualifies for state-supported medical insurance. Since 1989 the number of children with limited English proficiency has nearly doubled, to 118,244 in 1996. The rates of juvenile arrests more than doubled between 1985 and 1993, the most recent year for accurate statistics. The number of victims of child abuse and neglect fell in 1996, reversing a three-year upward trend - "fell" to 45,000 kids.
Kids will need to be high on the next governor's agenda for action; so will schools.
Surveys continue to show widespread dissatisfaction with the quality of public education. For example, when earlier this year the Princeton Survey Research asked various groups whether students learned the basics in local schools, nearly two-thirds of employers said a high school diploma was no guarantee that students had learned the three R's. A sizable minority of teachers (22 percent) and students (26 percent) agreed. When college professors were asked to rate their students' basic math and writing skills, just 17 percent ranked math skills as excellent or good. Just one in five academics said students had good writing skills, and only one out of four employers rated their recent job applicants high in ability to write clearly. Perhaps these gloomy assessments are to be expected from schools that employ teachers who also are weak in basic skills. Massachusetts had so many prospective teachers fail a basic skills test, it decided to lower the threshold score for passing it. Fixing schools will need to be high on the next governor's action agenda.
Right up there next to crime and corrections.
Falling crime rates have not led to declining prison populations. Illinois, like the nation at large, continues to incarcerate people at record rates. Jim Edgar entered office with the belief that the state could not afford to continue the prison-building binge of his predecessor. He has, however, increased the prison system's capacity, most notably the new Supermax penitentiary. If present spending trends on corrections persist, by 2005 Illinois will spend more to incarcerate criminals than it spends to educate students at its public universities. If Illinois' next governor wants to spend more money educating the state's young people, he will have to figure out how to incarcerate fewer of them.
Somewhere on an action agenda that includes kids and schools and crime, the next governor will have to find room for the environment. Though media attention often is focused on global environmental concerns, many pollution problems persist in states, along with a growing responsibility for environmental cleanup and protection.
For example, there is concern in Illinois that groundwater could be contaminated from leaking underground storage tanks containing fuel or hazardous chemicals. Environmentalists also worry that utility deregulation could endanger efforts to promote energy conservation.
Meanwhile, environmental protection is another area where authority is shifting from federal to state governments. States construct regulatory schemes, issue permits and enforce laws. In 1993, state environmental officials formed the Environmental Council of the States, an organization that stepped in to help resolve conflict over congressional renewal of the Clean Air Act. As responsibility for environmental protection continues to devolve to the states, the next governor will need to ensure his environmental protectors have the tools and the money to tackle the job.
A rather hefty agenda the next governor will face - not to mention mass transit and roads, property taxes and equity in school finance, Medicaid funding and managed care, tobacco regulation and doctor-assisted suicide, telecommunications policy and the Internet.
It will take a governor who is an effective communicator, a resourceful thinker and an energetic overachiever to govern in times like these.
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