Pubdate: Thu, 01 May 2003 Source: State, The (SC) Copyright: 2003 The State Contact: http://www.thestate.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/426 HOUSECLEANING AT DRUG AGENCY SHOWS STRENGTH OF CABINET TO THE EXTENT THAT anyone paid attention when Lee Catoe told a recent Cabinet meeting about changes he has put in place since being named director of the state Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services, they probably noticed his comments about mismanagement under the previous administration. After all, that's attention-grabbing -- and this is an agency that came under criminal investigation last year over questions about the former director's political and business activities on government time. But far more significant were the specific problems Mr. Catoe reported finding, and the actions he took: He hired a new financial director, he said, because he couldn't even determine how much money the agency had budgeted. He canceled government contracts for 32 of the 47 cell phones the 60-employee agency had. And he canceled the lease on 3,100 square feet of unused office space, which was costing taxpayers $51,000 a year. Small savings, to be sure, and certainly not enough to get the state -- or even this tiny agency -- out of its budget crisis. But the larger lesson here is about the importance of questioning the way things have always been done. While the need to do this seems especially clear as our state wrestles with compounding financial problems, it is something that any well-run organization does routinely -- and that government agencies do too infrequently. Critics of Cabinet government have always worried that giving the governor the power to hire and fire agency directors as he pleases will lead to turmoil, as directors rotate in and out every four or eight years. Too often, Cabinet supporters have responded by assuring people that this won't really be a problem, sometimes even suggesting that governors, given true control over the executive branch, won't really take advantage of their power, at least not on a wide-scale basis. In this way, we have missed the point: This turnover is actually one of the most attractive side-benefits of Cabinet government. (The primary purpose of Cabinet government, of course, is to allow the public to make choices about the direction they want their government to take, through the election of a governor, and have those choices carried out.) While change can be disruptive to employees, it is essential to improvement - -- at least in organizations that are too status quo-oriented, as our Legislature has taught government agencies to be. New managers are more likely than those who have been around forever -- and who very likely might have implemented the current policies -- to come in and ask: Why do we do this? And they're less likely to take "because we've always done it" for an answer. They're less wedded to practices that have been put in place to please individual employees or legislators rather than to serve the public. They're more willing to make changes. While the changes made by a new administration can sometimes amount to no more than baseless partisan cheap shots, we believe that more often they will turn out to be healthy housecleaning, along the lines of what Mr. Catoe is doing at the state's drug treatment agency. It's the kind of housecleaning we need throughout state government, but that we aren't likely to see until the governor is empowered to run the government he is elected to run. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh