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Records released Friday show that, even as Gov. Bush backed Kathleen Kearney, his staff was discussing Jerry Regier's coming to Florida.
By LUCY MORGAN and ALISA ULFERTS
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 8, 2002
TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Jeb Bush defended the director of the state's child welfare agency for months in public while quietly arranging to replace her.
A series of documents released by Bush's office late Friday make it clear that Bush began considering Oklahoma native Jerry Regier to head the Department of Children and Families after receiving a June 19 letter from Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating.
Keating suggested that Regier could help because he had cleaned up a troubled agency in Oklahoma and had worked for two presidents. At the time, the Florida agency was making national headlines over the disappearances and deaths of children in state custody.
E-mails indicate that Regier and Bush's staff started discussing a trip to Florida in mid July, more than a month before DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney submitted her resignation.
In a telephone news conference from his home in Oklahoma City on Saturday, Regier said he was initially talking about helping the agency as a consultant but was soon told that Kearney might not be staying.
Regier was appointed to take over the agency just two days after Kearney resigned on Aug. 13. He said Bush had formally offered the job a day earlier.
On Aug. 2, as Regier planned his first trip to Florida, he sent an e-mail to Bush's staff asking whether the DCF director's salary was set by legislators or the governor and whether it could be subsidized by the Governor's Office. Regier also wanted to know if he would be able to take on other employment if there was no conflict of interest.
On Saturday, Regier said he had no plans to do any outside consulting but was focusing instead on the serious problems facing the agency charged with the welfare of Florida's children.
"We can never eradicate some of the child deaths that are horrific, but I do want to eradicate the implication of department error," Regier said.
Through July and early August, Bush continued to defend Kearney despite heavy pressure from child welfare advocates and Democrats in the Legislature to get rid of her.
The documents released by the Governor's Office on Friday night included transcripts of testimony Regier gave before congressional committees and at the 1988 Republican convention's platform committee, as well as a series of articles Regier wrote in the 1980s while he was president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group.
Bush also released two videos produced by the council that feature Regier talking about ways to strengthen the family and about the harm that pornography and modern sex education can cause to communities and children.
In various articles written for churches and other Christian groups, Regier strongly supported heterosexual marriage and keeping all sex within marriage and urged mothers to stay at home with young children when possible.
Some of Regier's writings have sparked calls for his removal and accusations that he may extend extreme beliefs to the operation of the agency.
Although Regier stressed the need to preserve marriages, he also said in the documents that the "realities of our world" are such that families do fall apart. When that happens, "we must be supportive and not judgmental." He also noted that children in single-parent families may be better off than those who remain in a family filled with "marital disharmony."
Regier said the writings were done for religious groups and not as suggestions for the way to run a public agency.