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Putting the state's power in four men's hands could be interesting
© St. Petersburg Times Gov. Jeb Bush will be the star of Tuesday's inaugural ceremonies when he is sworn in for a second term. But governors come and go. Another change occurring Tuesday will be permanent -- the slicing in half of our state Cabinet. We will go from six elected Cabinet members to three: Charlie Crist, attorney general. Tom Gallagher, chief financial officer. Charles Bronson, agriculture commissioner. This matters a lot. The governor does not control the executive branch all by himself. He must share power with the Cabinet. They sit together as a four-person committee. Together, they run some of the most important state departments -- Revenue, Law Enforcement, Highway Safety, Natural Resources. Together, they govern all state lands and hear environmental appeals. They decide clemency. The first three (not the agriculture commissioner) control the state pension fund. It is tremendous power, now to be concentrated in only four pairs of hands. Before, there were six Cabinet members. Two jobs, secretary of state and education commissioner, became appointed posts. Two others, treasurer and comptroller, were combined into chief financial officer. The voters approved all this in a 1998 amendment to the state Constitution, to take effect this year. The main idea was to streamline a 19th century government. What will the results be? The first, without a doubt, will be more power directly in the hands of the governor. If the panel splits in a 2-2 tie, the governor's side automatically wins. So all he'll need is the vote of one Cabinet member. The tradeoff is more direct responsibility for him, and less spread across a committee. "The theory was that we would make the governor more responsible and more accountable than he was," says Dexter Douglass, chairman of the Constitution Revision Commission, which put the idea on the ballot. It was not a Republican plot: Douglass had been general counsel to the previous, Democratic governor, the late Lawton Chiles. The duties of attorney general and agriculture commissioner remain the same. "But to some extent, the most powerful person on there is the chief fiscal officer," Douglass observes. One wild card will be how much independent power Gallagher exerts. On Friday, I asked Bob Milligan, the well-respected state comptroller who is leaving public office, whether he expects the slimmed-down Cabinet to govern differently. "The Cabinet and governor will be lesser in number, but the critical aspect is that decisions still will be argued and made in the sunshine," Milligan replied. "So I don't really see any significant change there." In fact, Milligan believes Florida will be better off in one aspect. The regulators of insurance and financial service -- formerly under the treasurer and comptroller -- will now report directly to the governor and Cabinet, and will get more public scrutiny. "In the past, these have been less than visible," Milligan said. "So this is a great step forward, a very positive thing." One weird facet of the new Cabinet, which might loom large over time, is that the agriculture commissioner has a lot of power -- 25 percent of the whole shebang, if you will. Let's be blunt here -- the commissioner's post has been beholden to big agribusiness. The commissioner has not traditionally been Joe Environment, if you get my drift. However, the job now will be more visible. The potential for public outrage will be higher. It was agribusiness that demanded that an agriculture commissioner be kept as part of an elected Cabinet. It will be agribusiness that pays the price one day if a pro-consumer protest candidate is elected, just as Mary Barley threatened in this past election. Lastly, for those who fear that a smaller Cabinet will be nothing but a rubber stamp for Jeb Bush: two of its members, Crist and Gallagher, might well be candidates to succeed Bush in 2006. There will come a time when they have to distance themselves from him, as well as each other. With no Democrats in power, these rival ambitions will be the closest thing the Cabinet has to a check and balance. C'mon, it'll be fun.
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