Predecessors knew not to mess with the Regents

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By MARTIN DYCKMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

The Pork Chop Gang were rural legislators who earned the label for refusing to cede power to Florida's fast-growing cities and suburbs. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to dislodge them, 12 years after Gov. LeRoy Collins began the battle for fair apportionment.

But if they were painfully resistant to change, that was almost virtuous compared to the current Legislature's reckless disregard for institutions.

The Pork Choppers could be persuaded to be constructive, as when some contributed in their swan song session of 1965 to the creation of the Board of Regents and a strong chancellor to run the university system. That landmark achievement, which had taken six years, was undone in mere weeks this year by legislators who couldn't care less about the outcome. If it was old, to hell with it.

Former Sen. Ed H. Price of Bradenton called in anguish last week. He was a close friend of Collins, who had appointed him to the old Board of Control, the Regents' predecessor, in 1957. It became his great crusade to reform higher education. Now, everything he did is being trashed.

The board had no control over the university presidents, Price recalled.

"It was a disaster at legislative time, because all the presidents came up and fought."

In 1959, his first year as a senator, Collins asked him to introduce the chancellor bill. Bart Knight, a Pork Chop committee chairman, killed it with a pocketful of proxies. One by one, Knight voted absent senators "no."

"When he got to the end," Price said, "he said, "Sen. Price, you've been so eloquent you almost convinced me. I'll vote yes.' "

It finally passed six years later, along with a bill replacing the Board of Control with a stronger Board of Regents whose staggered terms, outlasting those of the governors who appointed them, would ensure continuity and insulate higher education from politics.

Some legislators, loyal to one university or another, still opposed strong central control. But, said Price, "we got enough Pork Chopper votes to get it passed."

For that session, Price's last, both the press corps and his colleagues honored him as the outstanding senator. He retired voluntarily, resisted urgings to run for governor, and contented himself to serve thereafter in various unpaid posts -- on the Citrus Commission, the Ethics Commission, and as an unpaid adviser to future Democratic governors Reubin Askew, Bob Graham and Lawton Chiles. No one has ever taken Florida's best interests more to heart, or served more selflessly. That the present governor and Legislature have no interest in taking counsel from such wise old hands is one of the great tragedies of our time.

Price's state senator is John McKay, a Bradenton Republican who will be Senate president if the GOP keeps its majority. At a chance meeting during the session, Price urged McKay to oppose the bill that would abolish the Regents, consolidate all levels of education under a so-called "superboard" in 2003, and likely create a separate board of trustees for each of the 10 universities.

"I just told John I think this is an extraordinarily bad bill for lots of reasons," Price said. "I don't think you ought to have K-12 and community colleges and institutions of higher learning under one head.

"The other thing is that if you're going to have a little board at each university, which is going to be a mess, then when it comes time for legislative appropriations for each of those universities, it's not going to be the alumni any more, it's going to be the areas with the most legislative representation that are going to be able to get what they want for their geographical locations and their institutions. Take Dade, Broward and Palm Beach and try to stack the University of Florida against them, there's no way to overcome."

McKay, he said, "simply said the train is on the track and it's running and it can't be stopped." But McKay also assured him that "it doesn't go into effect until 2003 and we can change it."

They could but they won't. Only the Supreme Court can stop them. The Constitution Revision Commission's specific intent was to exclude higher education from the superboard.

The bill McKay wouldn't stop, because a power-hungry governor wants it, is a "sunset" bill in name only. An honest sunset process leaves all options open. This Legislature's mind was as closed as that of Lewis Carroll's fictional Queen of Hearts when she declared, "No, No! . . . Sentence first. Verdict afterwards."

Only a few legislators objected to the prospect of the universities battling for spoils in Tallahassee once again. They were met with remarks like this: "How could it be any more political than it is now?"

That begged the question why. The universities wouldn't have dared to make end runs around the chancellor and Board of Regents -- or what's left of them -- if Gov. Jeb Bush, Speaker John Thrasher, McKay and other powerful politicians hadn't hung out the welcome mat.

Their predecessors knew better. These guys must want to make the Pork Choppers look good.

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