State: Ex-Okla. official eyed for DCF job

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Jeb Bush's search for a new director of the Department of Children and Families quickly focused Wednesday on Jerry Regier, a former Oklahoma human services secretary who worked for Bush's father and Ronald Reagan in the White House.

Regier, 57, who holds master's degrees from Harvard University and the International School of Theology in California, founded and was first president of the Family Research Council, which calls itself a pro-family group.

The council has likened abortion to "terrorism" and calls marriage and family "the foundation of civilization."

Messages left at Regier's home and office were not returned. Bush's office had little to say on the search for a replacement for Kathleen Kearney, who resigned Tuesday.

"The governor will announce a leader of DCF when he is ready, and soon," said Bush's spokeswoman, Katie Muniz. "It's a special individual who can do that job and do it well."

Regier, who works for an Oklahoma City consulting firm, traveled to Tallahassee recently to advise Bush on how to improve DCF.

Much of his government experience has been in public health and juvenile justice, not child welfare, and he was hired in 1997 to clean up an Oklahoma health department that was plagued by corruption. In that job, he supervised 2,500 employees, less than one-tenth the number of people who work for DCF.

In 1992, President George Bush, the governor's father, named Regier to lead the National Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Regier, a Republican, began running for Oklahoma governor early this year, but was forced to abandon his campaign because of a state law requiring a candidate to be a voter in the state for 10 years. Regier was three years short of the requirement.

Anne Roberts, director of the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy, praised Regier for emphasizing prevention as well as punishment. "He called it the wall of prevention," Roberts said. "He has a heart for kids."

By all accounts, so did Kearney, who left a secure job as a Broward County circuit judge to take charge of the most investigated, audited, studied and reorganized agency in Florida.

Democrats are eager to highlight DCF problems to portray Bush as weak and unable to fulfill his 1998 campaign promise of reform. If Regier is chosen, his conservative political leanings will produce more fodder for the opposition.

Bush stayed out of the public eye Wednesday, conducting business in his office and meeting with campaign aides outside the Capitol in the afternoon. The disciplined Bush public relations operation was quiet, but unsolicited advice on how to fix DCF was pouring in from all over.

David Lawrence, who recently headed a DCF task force formed by Bush after the disappearance of 5-year-old Rilya Wilson, said Bush should appoint a permanent secretary, not a caretaker. But he offered a word of caution for anyone seeking to take Kearney's place.

"You would be foolish to go into that job unless you had a discussion about what level of resources you're really going to push for," said Lawrence, president of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation and a former Miami Herald publisher.

He said the next DCF leader must be able to squeeze more money out of the Legislature and persuade communities to get involved. He said Kearney's relationship with lawmakers ranged from "marvelous" to "poor."

"We need to face up to the fact that we need a much greater investment in all of this," Lawrence said. DCF needs to increase salaries and reduce caseloads, he said, both of which contribute to extremely high turnover.

Kearney's replacement will inherit an agency with 750 vacant front-line jobs, a history of poor morale, high caseloads and weak support from the Legislature. A massive computer program to monitor abuse cases is being implemented, services are shifting from government to nonprofit community-based programs, and 45,000 children are under state supervision. Caseworkers have falsified records; children are unaccounted for.

The job pays $113,000 a year and no one seems to stay for very long.

Lee Johnson worked for the agency for 12 years under six DCF secretaries. He now runs the Sarasota YMCA, which provides child protection and mental health services in three counties.

"It's a tough job," Johnson said. "You've got to be an incredible person to be able to do it."

Bush has said that DCF's child welfare budget has doubled since he took office and that child adoptions have increased and caseloads dropped.

Democrats still see political capital in spotlighting DCF's problems.

Sen. Ron Klein, D-Delray Beach, said the "total lack of credibility" at DCF can best be addressed by a national search and the hiring of a child welfare expert with a track record of rebuilding a similar agency in a big state.

Klein criticized Bush and Kearney for not implementing all of the recommendations of the blue-ribbon task force Lawrence headed.

The Democratic Party and the Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers union, circulated portions of a transcript of Tuesday's CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown, who referred to a letter from a viewer complaining that the network was trying to embarrass Bush.

"That's silly," Brown said, according to the transcript. "We do these stories because the state of Florida has lost 500 children and has, without any help from us, embarrassed itself. And to the extent that reflects badly on the governor . . . we say too bad."

On the day after Kearney announced her resignation, her agency faced a lawsuit by a newspaper seeking to open the files of 22 children missing under its care. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is challenging a state law that keeps such files confidential, claiming that the benefit to the public outweighs privacy concerns.

The paper's disclosure last weekend that it tracked down nine missing kids within hours by using law enforcement records and interviews undermined efforts by Kearney and Bush to say things were improving.

-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

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