by Jackson Baker
t is
midday in the bustling basement-level cafeteria of Nashville's Legislative
Plaza, and the gathered solons of the state House and Senate, their aides,
the lobbyists who beseech them, and the journalists whose job it is to turn
a hawk's eye on all of the above have put down their burdens long enough
to see about the business of some daily bread.
One
of this teeming lunch crowd is a tidily dressed gray-haired man, nondescript
except for his vaguely owlish look, who pays for his lunch, then heads with
two young companions towards a long row table near the door. Without breaking
their conversational routine, various people nod to him or say hello as
he moves among them and sits down.
"Governor," they say by way of greeting, and he nods back, occasionally flashing the toothy Cheshire grin which can unexpectedly animate his bespectacled face and ease the normally tight composure of his features. His expressionless blue-gray eyes seem always to be involved in a wary evaluation of what they see.
This is Don Sundquist, who is entering his third year as Governor of Tennessee, and, if all goes well, will be seeking a second four-year term next year. Although, as he will end up confiding on this very day, he may not be returning to Memphis as a resident when he -- or the voters -- decide he's had enough at the helm of Tennessee affairs, Sundquist is a Shelby Countian, the first governor in a generation to be elected from what was once, in the long-gone days of Boss Ed Crump, the state's politically dominant area.
Shelby is still the most populous county, but just barely, and has by most accounts fallen, economically and politically, into the shadow of metropolitan Nashville, not only the seat of state government but a rapidly ascendant business-entertainment center, which, as Memphians know all too well, will shortly lay claim, after the briefest of flirtations, to a franchise of the very same National Football League that for decades haughtily spurned the Bluff City.
Sundquist was instrumental in putting together the combination of state and local aid which landed the NFL's Houston Oilers in Nashville ("in Tennessee," as the governor prefers to put it), and that fact, fairly or not, has not always sat well back home.
After the announcement last month of Sundquist's 1997 austerity budget, Memphis seemed to some to have other reasons for feeling like a gubernatorial stepchild: The city's mental-health centers were caught in the budget crunch, financial reserves were taken from TSEA (the state agency responsible for helping Memphis' large low- and middle-income population become homeowners), colleges and other public facilities were squeezed, and even the modest riverfront development promised the city for its acquiescence in the Oilers deal seemed stymied.
Still, as he sits inconspicuously amid the general hubbub and does a workmanlike job on his spartan lunch of pasta salad, stewed okra, and crackers, washing it all down with a glass of iced tap water, Don Sundquist remains The Man. Press secretary Beth Fortune and Sundquist's Man Friday, special assistant Chip Saltsman, are close by. The space across from Sundquist is filled by Tom Hensley, lobbyist extraordinaire for the state's liquor interests. Next to Hensley is Drue Smith, the venerable and flamboyant freelance journalist who, in her inimitable stage whisper, begins spreading the word: "The governor's going to have a party for me!" And Jim Neely, long the chief spokesman for labor in Tennessee, drops by to say hello.
"Hey, stick around, I've got a story I need to tell you," Sundquist says, and, as soon as he is done eating, rises and walks off with Neely. Following close behind are Fortune and young Saltsman, whose father Bruce Saltsman, a self-described "McWherter Republican" and a bridge of sorts between administrations, is the governor's Commissioner of Transportation.
LIKE HIS TWO-TERM PREDECESSOR, NED RAY MCWHERTER, the folksy longtime Speaker of the House from Dresden, Sundquist has been privileged to be governor in a period of relative prosperity. And, like his fellow West Tennessean, Sundquist has served in a time of general popular revulsion against the very idea of taxation. McWherter found that out to his chagrin when, after his reelection as governor in 1990, he tried -- and failed -- to bring the state's elementary and secondary education base up to snuff (and up to the level required by various remedial court decisions) by introducing a state income tax. His own partymates shied away from his enacting legislation, and the self-sacrificial sponsorship of it by State Senator Leonard Dunavant of Millington would cost that Republican stalwart his seat at the next election.
McWherter had to settle for another half-cent kick upward in the state sales tax, an option which is probably unavailable to Sundquist even if he wanted to pursue it. The current rate, a 6-cent state floor, with provision for another 2.75 cents to be raised by local option, has Tennessee already pushing the consumer-tax envelope among the states. Yet there is general recognition that something has to be done as the financial demands of state government -- Sundquist's crime initiatives, his Families First welfare-reform package, a commitment to more prisons and to increased funding for the Better Education Program (BEP) he inherited from McWherter, the escalating costs of the TennCare health insurance program, et al., et al. -- begin to outstrip the state's current revenue base.
One day last week, sitting at a gubernatorial desk which is modestly appointed but festooned with miniature state flags, Sundquist outlined what he saw as the problem: "I didn't create the budget crisis, but I'm having to deal with the budget crisis. Growth in Tennessee has been good, but it's not as much as everybody has expected. So we've got to tighten our belts."
Overseeing that process, he would go on to say in the interview, was only what voters had expected of him in 1994, when he successfully carried the Republican standard against Democrat Phil Bredesen. "Managing our resources and reinvesting those resources -- I think that's what people wanted me to do. I hope people will realize that I'm not the kind of governor who'll try to find ways of raising taxes but one who will do everything possible not to raise taxes."
Since the state constitution mandates a balanced budget, since various mandated expenditures were up (an additional $70 million for public-school education had to be ponied up because of the discovery only this year that a clerk in the McWherter administration had added columns wrong five years ago!), and since taxes were out of the question, that meant using the gubernatorial knife to cut some $110 million off the total of last year's state expenditures.
Among other things, it meant hacking $4 million out of the already bare-bones operating budget of the University of Memphis. "We're cutting into the muscle now," said one university official as U of M president Lane Rawlins himself made ready for what was billed as an emergency visit to Nashville this week in order to try to stanch the bleeding.
"The University of Memphis is a wonderful school, but for the next two years we're asking our college presidents to tighten up and figure out how to save money," Sundquist responded last week, noting that Tennessee higher education as a whole would be asked to slim down by some $40 million -- a figure that, he suggested, was proportionally less than the $15 million which he says he has squeezed out of state administrative costs.
Many of those administrative cuts have come at the expense of state employees, some 753 of whom he plans to put out to pasture during fiscal 1997. As a result, the governor has been locked in a virtual war with the Tennessee State Employees Association, a combat which started in Sundquist's first year in office, when he undertook to fire a host of state employees by the expedient of "promoting" them from civil-service positions into appointed "executive" positions long enough to take advantage of the change in status and fire them.
Earlier this year, Sundquist was widely accused of insensitivity when he announced both the imminent layoffs for unlucky state employees and a wage freeze for the lucky ones, while simultaneously raising salaries for members of his own staff.
Asked about it last week, Sundquist called his staff raises "promotions" which, he said, were the result of eliminating four positions and cutting staff salaries in the aggregate by some 15 percent. As for the criticisms of him: "The Tennessee State Employees Association -- no matter what I do, they'll misinterpret it, and they'll use it [the misinterpretation] for their own benefit. You've heard all the screaming and hollering about how `insensitive' I was, because you've got built-in forces like TSEA who don't want us to cut back the size of government. But the taxpayers do. And the people I care for are the taxpayers."
BUT IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE? The showdown with TSEA is seen by other Nashville insiders, including some who maintain close relations with the governor, as indicative of a fundamental Sundquist failing -- the ironic one, for a politician, of being impolitic.
Taking time out from working the halls of Legislative Plaza last week, a lobbyist and longtime Sundquist friend grimaced as he recalled the events of last Monday when, as he saw it, the governor had snatched a public-relations defeat from the jaws of victory.
First, Sundquist had held a much-publicized summit meaning at the governor's mansion with the members of the state's congressional delegation and legislative leaders of both parties. Discussed was a wide range of public issues, ranging from Families First and TennCare to what to do with Oak Ridge and how to reconfigure TVA and how best to convert to other ends Tennessee's share of federal Internet funds for the schools. (In a much-vaunted Sundquist triumph, the state administration had led the way among the states, having already succeeded in putting all of Tennessee's schools online.)
So far, so good. The governor had figured in the roles of peacemaker, conciliator, and consensus finder. No conclusions had been reached, but Sundquist had been seen reaching across divides constructively. Moreover, the media had been invited out to the mansion, stroked, and asked to lunch, too. And what reporters saw was reassuring.
Only a year earlier, Sundquist had been involved in a no-win imbroglio with a Nashville urchin who claimed that the governor had stolen his dog, which indeed had strayed over onto the mansion grounds and been adopted by the state's first family. In the end, Sundquist had to give up the dog, named Bailey, and, in a tragic denouement, the dog became a stray again and ended up being euthanized in a Nashville animal shelter.
Now here was the governor not only being publicly statesmanlike but sporting out on his lawn on this mild Monday afternoon with three tenderly affectionate pet dogs. A first citizen, indeed.
Then, on Monday night, as Sundquist's lobbyist friend saw it anyhow, the whole carefully prepared image came tumbling down. A bipartisan group of legislative friends of TSEA brought before the House of Representatives a bill that would, by altering the employment formula for state employees, restore some of the fired workers to their jobs and offer additional protections to civil-service employees.
As both the lobbyist and another Sundquist ally, a GOP senator, agreed, revulsion against the layoffs had crossed party lines. However well the cut-the-fat issue might have played in the state at large, it played poorly in the government circles of a state whose public work force -- drawn equally from Republican East Tennessee, Democratic Middle Tennessee, and the political Duke's mixture of West Tennessee -- had always been heavily bipartisan.
Even so, the governor twisted arms among the GOP members of the House, forcing most of them to oppose the measure when it came up for a vote Monday night. It passed anyhow. "Now his own people are privately grumbling," said the lobbyist. "Hell, this thing is a fight over nothing. Don's not helping himself politically."
Worse from the lobbyist's point of view, the affair threatened to metamorphosize into a generalized rural vs. urban affair in which the interests of Sundquist's own Memphis and Shelby County might suffer.
Not only had Mayor W.W. Herenton's latest $15 million request for riverfront money been turned down flat, but the smaller $7 million bond package authorized by the legislature last year, along with money for county jail improvements, had to be resubmitted because of technical imperfections in the bill language -- glitches for which the Sundquist administration got the blame. Now, all that money, verbally refitted, was at risk in the House Finance Budget Subcommittee, where the chairman, State Rep. Tommy Head of Clarksville, was said to be irked at the administration, and thus at Memphis, on account of the TSEA issue.
Spokesmen for the city and county held their breaths Wednesday as the bill was "rolled," i.e., put off to another day. All things considered, it came off as a reprieve.
HOW WELL, IN GENERAL, ARE DON Sundquist's home folks faring under his administration? It's a mixed bag:
ITEM: The Nashville Banner -- owned by the husband of Sundquist's former chief of staff, the controversial Peaches Simpkins, and normally friendly to the administration -- raised a ruckus last week about a bill, joined in by both Sundquist and the Democratic legislative leadership, to give FedEx a long-term $6 million tax break in order to keep its proposed new technology center in Shelby County. (It was a stealth bill of sorts, since -- cart before the horse -- the governor had already officiated at a ground-breaking ceremony for the new center some two weeks earlier.)
From Sundquist's point of view, this is public policy at its best -- using low taxes as bait for industry. As he said last week, "FedEx was getting ready to put their high-tech computer operations in Colorado. We made it possible for them to stay." The governor had also, as he noted, worked closely with Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout to speed up extension of Nonconnah Parkway. (Roadbuilding is one piece of state largesse which Sundquist has been relatively unsparing of.)
On balance, score one for the home team -- although the FedEx bill is, in a sense, merely a companion measure to the even larger $9 million tax boost given Columbia HCA two years ago to entice the health-care giant to relocate its headquarters in Nashville.
And, as the Banner pointed out, the two bills together could be starving the state of significant political revenue needed to keep other programs going.
ITEM: One of those is the Tennessee Housing Development Agency, which in recent years has been mounting a highly organized program of financial support for low- to middle-income homebuyers. Sundquist's new budget would, by some estimates, reroute as much as $88 million from THDA reserves to the state general fund, thereby bringing the agency's prump-priming activities to a virtual halt.
Although THDA's board of directors initially seemed complaisant, other interested parties vowed to resist the fund diversion. State Comptroller William Snodgrass denounced it this past weekend as a form of "deficit financing," that could wreck the state's bond rating, Democratic House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh indicated that THDA could become the issue for a general legislative revolt, and even Republican legislators fell out of step with the GOP governor.
E.g. Tre Hargett, the newly elected state representative from stoutly middle-class Bartlett, one of the most reliably Republican areas in the state and one with a surplus of both potential home buyers and home builders. "I don't think the administration is aware of how important THDA is to my district," said Hargett, who planned to meet with Sundquist's finance commissioner, Memphian John Ferguson, to express his concerns.
Said Sundquist: "We're reducing the size of their reserves to the extent that they will [still] have a better ratio between loans and reserves than they had five years ago, in 1992." It was simply a matter of having to choose between taking THDA's reserves and forfeiting on the state's obligation to the Better Education Plan (BEP), the governor maintained.
ITEM: Another potential take-from-Peter-to-pay-Paul arrangement emerged at the Shelby County delegation's regular Wednesday meeting last week when county lobbyist Bobby Bowers introduced Doug Goddard of the Tennessee County Services Association.
Goddard proceeded to warn the delegation about an administration bill which, in order to keep the state's $10 million Tennessee Infrastructural Improvement Programs (TIIPs) funded, would avail itself of some $5 million normally allocated to counties for use in funding schools and other basic services.
"We're concerned about the dedication to state issues of money that's been dedicated locally," said Goddard, who urged the Shelby legislators to turn back the pending measure.
ITEM: Memphis Museum System director Doug Noble was in Nashville last week, along with Tennessee Arts Commission member Annabel Woodall, a staunch Sundquist loyalist, to try to hold onto a $176,000 state appropriation for Shelby County's version of the "Science Museum 4 Tennessee" program.
The state has customarily paid 25 percent of the cost of the program, which allows some 260,000 children annually to take science-based field trips. Last year's state portion was slashed by 45 percent; this year's budget eliminates the state portion altogether.
"The schools don't have any money for field trips, and Shelby County doesn't own its own buses. The kids are going to have to make up the difference out of their pockets," said Noble, who hopes to recoup some of the lost funding and meanwhile will have to use guesswork in preparing his own provisional budget.
ITEM: But the most troubling provisions of Don Sundquist's 1997 budget may turn out to be those which provide for funding of mental health under TennCare, the state successor agency to the federal Medicaid program. Sundquist boasts that, by including children in this year's TennCare appropriation, the state will have achieved a 95 percent health-insurance-coverage rate for its citizens, and that, says the governor, leads the nation.
In the process of consolidating its general medical payouts, however, the administration last July shifted Department of Health and Mental Retardation services into a managed-care network called TennCare Partners. The "partners" are two behavioral health organizations (BHOs), whom the state has contracted to pay some $350 million which, in turn, the BHOs -- after taking their 10 percent cut -- are obliged to pay out to physicians and hospitals who actually furnish patient care.
The new system has come under fire, however, from critics who charge that it shortchanges both the patients and the institutions, like Memphis Mental Health Institute, which formerly administered most of the patient care under direct state subsidy.
Prodded by freshman U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr., the federal Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA, pronounced "Hic-Fah"), which had provisionally approved TennCare Partners, recently sent inspectors to check out the program's operation. Perhaps ominously, HCFA summoned to Washington this week virtually every state official concerned with Tenncare other than Sundquist himself.
Instead of the "award" from HCFA, sarcastically predicted by chief legislative overseer Roy Herron, the officials got 30 days from the agency to get their act together.
BUT, AS DON SUNDQUIST HIT THE back stretch of his first term as governor, it was not only the details of his program that bothered various critics, it was also a matter of intangibles and, for that matter, of simple scratch-my-back services. There was the former Sundquist fund-raiser, for example, who had tried and failed to get a waiver from the Department of Transportation allowing construction access through a stretch of I-240 fence so that a client could build three hotels in Southeast Memphis.
"It was a trivial technicality, that's all. Yet it was worth $30 million! I couldn't get Bruce Saltsman or anybody else to take action!" expostulated the Memphian. "And to see Don, you really have to grit your teeth and go through channels. Back in the old days, I used to come in here, call up Harlan Matthews and walk right in to see Ned McWherter." Like various others, the man considers Memphian Hardy Mays, the governor's new chief of staff, to be conspicuously less abrasive than predecessor Simpkins, but still too green to be a full-fledged facilitator.
The aforesaid Matthews, Governor McWherter's longtime chief of staff and most recently an interim member of the U.S. Senate, is a partner these days in the prestigious Memphis/Nashville law firm of Farris, Matthews, Gilman, Branan & Hellen, but he once again walks the halls of Legislative Plaza on behalf of various clients. Asked to evaluate Sundquist's tenure, he has the look of the little boy whose mother told him never to say anything unless it was something nice.
Matthews utters various grace notes, and finally, reluctantly, the man whose own wife, an assistant commissioner of Human Services, was one of the first state employees fired by Sundquist on day one of the new administration in 1995 allows himself to say that maybe it was Sundquist's history as a 12-year congressman away up there in the take-no-prisoners atmosphere of political Washington that caused him to think in terms of such partisan abruptness.
A veteran Legislative Plaza journalist also invokes the national comparison but sees things differently. Sundquist is a nice man who, for better or worse, leaves the details to others. He resembles nobody so much as Ronald Reagan. And there are plenty of others who see the governor not only as well-intentioned but as successful -- Memphis advertising executive Becky West, for example, who is grateful that the Sundquist administration has newly opened up the state tourism contract for competitive bidding, and State Senator Curtis Person, a GOP elder statesman who, perhaps unsurprisingly, sees Sundquist as a man of his word and a faithful steward of the people.
Nor are kind words confined to the ranks of political supporters. Mainstream Democratic state representatives like Shelby Rhinehart of Spencer, chairman of the Joint House-Senate Fiscal Committee, and Carol Chumney of Memphis each say that Sundquist didn't do badly with the budget choices he faced, that it would be hard to see how anybody else could have done things much differently. And almost everybody credits the governor with being a quick study, able to learn from his mistakes.
Although there are skeptics, to be sure, perhaps it is true, too, that Sundquist's innovative Familes First program, designed to ease the long-term financial burden of welfare by providing short-term support services to help get families off the rolls, has been a success. The governor claims it took some 20,000 people off welfare last year -- a third of the total coming from Shelby County. It will be years, of course, before the effects of his various anti-crime initiatives -- called "Feel-Good" by some critics -- can be evaluated.
Sometime next year, Sundquist will take a look at the estimated $2.5 million he has raised, and probably, as "I guess I always assumed I would," announce his reelection bid. He will be favored against any of several possible Democratic contenders: U.S. Reps. Bob Clement and John Tanner, businessman Clayton McWhorter, Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen, former House Majority Leader Bill Purcell, whomsoever. Only one name, that of former Governor McWherter, heard more and more in Legislative Plaza, is guaranteed to haunt him, but McWherter is said to value his retirement more than the opportunity to play savior for his party.
Meanwhile, leaders of the Democratic legislature, notably Speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington and his associates in the House leadership, have vowed -- with the help of Connie Hardin, the legislature's newly hired budget director -- to run the proverbial fine-toothed comb over every line and item of the governor's austerity budget.
Last week the House Finance Committee, chaired by Matt Kisber of Jackson, began that scrutiny, calling before it each and every of Sundquist's commissioners and department heads to give an accounting.
Kisber was quick to pronounce judgment. "Smoke and mirrors," "a budgetary charade," he called the governor's bulky document.
And indeed there were some strange or at least conversely things there, sure to provoke a lengthy, politically charged battle.
Next Week: The Budget Battle -- What the Numbers Crunch Really Means for Memphis and Shelby County.