Rearranging the pieces

The transition is the first thing a new gubernatorial administration does, and usually the last thing it has the time to try to do well. The process sometimes has resembled a game of musical chairs, most often a potlatch. Increasingly, it resembles a corporate job search.

In the interregnum, election to inauguration, the politician must become a personnel manager. In addition to his personal staff, he must name directors for the 30 executive agencies — the "code departments "established in the Administrative Code, plus others set up by statute. On a side plate are appointments to vacant positions on nearly 300 committees, commissions, boards, councils and authorities that range in clout from the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority to the Advisory Board on Necropsy Service to Coroners.

At its simplest, staffing a new administration is like hiring for any large organization. First, one must learn which jobs need to be filled, and what each job requires. Two, one must find candidates qualified to do that job, and choose the best among them. And three, one must persuade those preferred candidates to take the job. Done right, the process is a complicated business, and it must be done scores of times, in less than two months.

Like most things in state government, transitions used to be simpler. Forty years ago, state agencies were staffed essentially by clerks, and agency directors were little more than head clerks. A few directorships required specialized expertise - the top man at the old Department of Conservation, for example, had to be able to shoot ducks — but most candidates were considered qualified if they were politically loyal and kept their pants on in public.

Even then it was hard to fill every slot. In his biography of the late governor, John Bartlow Martin tells the story of Adlai Stevenson's travail in finding someone to run the Department of Mines and Minerals. The best man for the job couldn't be hired because he was opposed by the miners' union. The next choice accepted only after a dubious stratagem to augment his pay, then died after three weeks on the job. From a new batch of 17 applicants, the best had a wife who refused to move to Springfield, and the second-best had family involved in the rackets. Stevenson finally settled on the manager of a downstate mine, whose credentials for the post were exposed when his old mine blew up a couple of years later, killing 119 miners.

Cynics suggest that little has changed, that all a person needs to be a successful state agency director today is a sound bladder (all those meetings) and the ability to recognize a useful idea in time to excise it from any official reports. While the cynical view cannot be totally dismissed in Illinois, the directorship of many state agencies these days demands, and quite often gets, people of passing quality. Today, a conscientious director must be familiar with information technologies, hiring law, benefits issues, budget-making and the arcana of federal programs, not to mention have specialized skills unique to her agency, from speaking Educator to understanding a hedge contract.

Happily for transitioneers, the talent pool is deeper than ever. Government as a career attracts people a step above teaching in talent and

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above business in ethics. And there is a shadow government of private not-for-profit lobbying and watchdog agencies whose staff are a lush orchard of issues expertise and experienced administrative talent that a new governor may pick from. As for the laity, well, even they come with fatter resumes. Here's one example: Tradition dictates that the director of the state ag department be a farmer, but farmers aren't exactly farmers anymore. Take Becky Doyle, tapped for that job by Edgar in 1991. Doyle, a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Agriculture who also studied international affairs at Washington University and at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, comanaged a livestock operation — and was a Republican precinct committee woman.

According to myth, the transition is little more than a divvying up of the spoils. The main qualification for a top job is political loyalty, if not to the victorious party, then to the person of the new governor. But loyalty is not to be despised as a job qualification. Whatever his statutory responsibilities, an agency director's real job is to implement the new governor's policies, or at least to obscure his lack of them. At a minimum there must be a broad philosophical sympathy between appointer and appointee, because even when a governor spells out the "what" of an agency's agenda, a director still enjoys latitude regarding the "how." Besides, only someone who has been stuck with the job of running a government like Illinois' appreciates the capacity for mischief that inheres in its many agencies, and thus the need a governor has for people of tested loyalty whose judgment he can trust.

In any event, there also is a long tradition in Illinois of governors naming members of previous administrations, members of other parties, or nonpartisan professionals to key posts. Many critics dismiss pledges to "find the best people" as mere rhetoric, but it is in a governor's urgent interest to do so. The management skills of his key department heads are a governor's bulwark against accusing headlines, and people with a lot of skills are often passed from governor to governor, as they pass on the precious antiques in the Mansion—people like John Kramer, who began at the transportation department under Dan Walker, Jim Thompson appointees Art Quern and Jess McDonald and, possibly, Jim Edgar picks Kirk Brown and Howard Peters. In days past, finding candidates for available posts couldn't have been easier. The county chairmen of the victorious political parties would propose and the new governor would dispose, according to his sense of which agencies needed to be run well, and which could withstand the

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indifferent attentions of a well-connected caretaker. The parties these days reportedly play a lesser role, but there is no lack of advice on whom to put where.

Finding qualified candidates, however, is trickier. The old maxim — it's not what you know but who you know — applies with particular force to new governors. Jim Edgar, who had been in Illinois government his whole life, wrung his Rolodex like a sponge and still could not come up with enough good people to fill all his cabinet posts. Springfield outsiders — the Walkers, the Thompsons — must cast their nets even wider.

Of course, making appointments is a political process meant to appease both special interest and party. We may assume it was not his civic-mindedness that qualified the chairman of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association to sit on Edgar's transition team, or the Illinois Education Association president to chair George Ryan's education committee. Further, state jobs have been administered as a balm for the bruised ego of failed candidates for decades. Sue Suter, Becky Doyle and Terry Gainer were among Edgar's top appointees who won jobs after losing elections for the governor's party. Speculation was widespread that Loleta Didrickson, having martyred herself in the Republican U.S. Senate primary, will join the saints in the Ryan cabinet.

Even when a person is hired to placate an interest group or to pay off a party debt, plausible qualifications must be presented. (This is the legacy of 100 years of reform in Illinois: Even hacks need credentials.) Mike Lawrence, the former Edgar press secretary who was part of that transition team, says, "There's a difference between campaigning and governing. One piece of advice I think is important to incoming elected officials: You should be loyal to the people who helped you get into that position, but don't need to demonstrate that loyalty by putting them into positions for which they are ill-suited."

Finding good people often is only the first hurdle. Getting them to take the job often is harder. Inconveniently, the people who know the most about a given field are also likely to be the people who have an interest in it, with the result that many a promising job candidate is ruled out because of real or apparent conflicts of interest. Resources are often scant; the first assignment faced by all of Edgar's picks in 1991 was to slash their departments' budgets because of the state's parlous finances. Then there are the working conditions (squalid by private-sector standards) and the relatively low pay (Edgar complained after his transition that several of his new appointees had to take pay cuts in accepting their new jobs), besides having to deal with the attentions of a nosy press, and the entanglements of civil service, patronage and unions.

Because of these constraints, it is almost impossible even for people of ability to do well in such jobs, and if one does do well, few people notice outside the Statehouse complex. Agency directorships thus almost never are launching pads for careers outside the bureaucracy. Most conscientious directors get so badly bruised that they leave state service looking not for challenges but for rest — a nice quiet job with a professional association, perhaps, or some part-time lobbying job that includes lots of lunches.

No wonder people with worldly ambitions do not slaver to run even a Department of Transportation, much less a Department of Children and Family Services, the latter assignment being less like management than the Peace Corps. Things got so bad under Thompson that he seemed to conceive of state agency directorships as entry-level jobs and, it often seemed, fill them with kids whose previous work experience was organizing fraternity rush weeks.

Then there is the problem of asking people from metropolitan climes to go into voluntary exile in the capital. "Real problems," says Ganchiff. "Family issues entered into it in a critical way." Some fret about the ability of a professional spouse to find work in a small job market, others about the quality of local schools. More convenient travel between Springfield and Chicago has solved the problem for some, but constant travel is itself a drain.

Might transitions be improved by (for example) reducing the sheer number of appointments a new governor has to make? The governor's power to directly appoint the executive staffs of some key departments and agencies already has been reduced. While he appoints members of agencies such as the Capital Development Board, the board picks the agency's executive director. The problem is that the number of appointments per se is not necessarily the problem. A new governor does not personally search for the best and the brightest to sit on, say, the Governor's Fitness Council's 13-member advisory committee and its 50-member at-large council. Indeed, the chief executive seldom personally reviews candidates below the assistant director level.

In any event, achieving a less freighted transition at the cost of clout is unlikely to appeal to even the most efficiency-minded governor. Edgar, for example, has proposed a cabinet-level department of education over whose schools chief he presumably would enjoy direct power of appointment, rather than the indirect power he now has to appoint the people who appoint that person. Don Udstuen, who was an assistant to the governor on Richard Ogilvie's transition, is not alone in his opinion that, "In fairness, if you're going to hold the governor responsible for the conduct of these agencies, you can't delegate the appointment process."

If the number of appointments can't be reduced, might the time available to make them be increased? No one any longer expects a new governor to make all of even the

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important appointments by inauguration Day. With a month to go before he was to be sworn in, Ryan, for example, had just started to name chairs to a dozen transition committees. Recalls Ganchiff, "When I look back at that experience, I scratch my head. How did we ever pull that off, given the time frame?"

Recent Illinois governors are themselves reforming the transition process, and judged by the Progressive-era standards that still pertain in such matters, most people would conclude it is being improved. Since 1980, the trend has been toward broader participation, more structured participation and depoliticized executive searches.

Adlai Stevenson II sat down with two or three aides to brainstorm his transition. Illinois in 1948 had about 25 percent fewer people living in it than today, and the state government was relatively smaller still. No wonder then that for his first term, Jim Edgar assembled a committee of more than four dozen advisers (he'd originally planned a group of about 30), and Ryan has set up a dozen committees, organized by policy area, each with its own prominent citizen as its head.

Transition teams are getting broader in purpose as well as membership. Under Edgar, they advised on policy. Ryan's 400 official advisers constitute a sort of sym bolic cabinet; an ad hoc mechanism for policy and personnel review has become a means of ritual inclusion. This is not bad; such panels legitimize not only the new administration but state government itself by involving a public that is otherwise remote from it, making the process "political" in the best sense. The risk is that a governor's staff, already pressed by the need to get an administration in place, is distracted by appointing and running a transition team that is too diffuse in structure and purpose.

Within practical limits, broader is better. Thompson came into office owing relatively little to his party and so was able to take an ecumenical approach to hiring; the process brought some first-class people into state government. Edgar's transition committee co-chairs included West Side activist Nancy Jefferson. Recalls Mike Lawrence, "She brought a perspective that would not have been there otherwise. As a result, we considered people who are not familiar to the governor or his senior staff. We ended up with more women and minorities in top positions than any governor ever had."

"Objectivity has to be maintained," suggests Ganchiff. "Ideally, there ought to be people assigned to the process that don't have political strings attached." A possible model is the three nine-member merit commissions used by Illinois' two U.S. Sens. Richard Durbin and Carol Moseley-Braun to recommend the most qualified candidates for vacant federal judgeships in the state. But again, it's hard to see a governor relinquishing his discretion in such matters, nor would it necessarily be appropriate. A little objectivity goes a long way in such matters. Judges are hired to apply the law on behalf of all, but bureaucrats must implement policy on behalf of one governor. there is no permanent transition mechanism, each new administration has to reinvent the wheel. Of course, each administration brings to the task different personalities with different political priorities — well, slightly different, this being Illinois — who must cope with different fiscal circumstances. But the process imore alike from governor to governor than it is different. There are lessons that can be learned, in short, but no formal means to share knowledge of how to do a good transition, or at least of how to avoid messing one up.

Because Illinois governors have been Republicans since 1976, transition advice has become a species of family lore. Edgar asked wise heads from the Thompson Administration to help, including policy wonk extraordinaire Paula Wolff, who served as executive director of Edgar's transition team. Lawrence confirms that Wolff and colleagues such as Sally Jackson were "helpful" to their successor staff. Ryan also tapped such Thompson veterans as top aide Samuel Skinner, head of Ryan's transportation panel. However, such help can't be counted upon when the Mansion passes from one party to another; Thompson transitioneers found the attitude of Democrat Dan Walker's staff to be less than collegial.

Says Udstuen, "There's no formula. What would be a good transition for one person may not fit how another person wants to go about it. Some governors like to get very intimately involved in detail, others like to see the final draft." Lawyer Thompson, for instance, wanted a case made for each potential appointee.

Concludes Udstuen," It really has to be tailored." Lawrence agrees. "I believe in giving a new governor as much flexibility as he or she can get and then holding them accountable." 

James Krohe Jr. is a contributing editor to Illinois Issues.

MORE TO COME But what if none of this transition process maters? Granted, a prudent governor wishes not to put a bad director in charge, but is it really important to put in a good one? ANd who really runs most state departments and agencies anyway? More about that next month. The Editors

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