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GOV. CONFERENCE |
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R-T-D: Jul 21 |
Jul 19 |
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'HE BELIEVED GOVERNMENT COULD WORK'
Baliles' focused approach during term as governor is praised at conference
By Tyler Whitley
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
The major legacy of Gov. Gerald L. Baliles's administration, a $422 million-a-year tax package designed to improve Virginia's transportation system, was a crushing disappointment to Baliles himself.
Ray D. Pethtel, Baliles' transportation commissioner, remembers congratulating Baliles "on his tremendous victory" after a special General Assembly session approved the transportation package in 1986.
"I saw anguish and disappointment on his face," Pethtel recalled last week at a conference reviewing Baliles' widely hailed political career. "He said, 'It's just not enough.'"
Nevertheless, Baliles quickly put the best spin on his disappointment, saying he could achieve his goals in 121/2 years, rather than the 10 years he had sought when he initially proposed a $570 million annual increase.
"Can you imagine what kind of gridlock people would daily be encountering in this state had Governor Baliles not had the foresight to raise taxes 16 years ago?" asked former Gov. Linwood Holton Jr. as he gave a closing summary of the Baliles administration.
Holton, a Republican governor from 1970 to 1974, also raised taxes and he praised Baliles for rejecting "the demagoguery" of the anti-tax movement, mostly within his own Republican Party.
Baliles, a Democrat, was governor from 1986 to 1990. He is now 62 and practicing law in Richmond.
"He had the courage to take the political hit for raising taxes for improvements that future governors would cut the ribbons on," said Del. Vivian E. Watts, D-Arlington, who was secretary of public safety and transportation under Baliles.
In a two-day conference sponsored by the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, former colleagues praised Baliles for his focused approach to governing.
"He believed government could work," said H. Benson Dendy III of Richmond, a former special assistant to Baliles.
Colleagues described the former governor as an executive who put a premium on strategic planning, preparation and setting goals without micromanaging.
They recalled the intimidation of four-inch-thick briefing books that he expected them to memorize. As he raced to pursue his extensive agenda in a four-year term, they recalled him trying to stretch the day with 11 p.m. phone calls to their homes.
The Patrick County native's approach to preparation was evident early in his political career when he was a little-known member of the House of Delegates, representing a Richmond-Henrico seat from 1976 to 1982.
Former Del. Joan Jones, a Lynchburg Democrat who served with Baliles in the House of Delegates, recalled how Baliles successfully secured passage of a bill allowing right turns on red - legislation, joked one panelist, that might be his most remembered legacy.
Baliles didn't just focus on the daily irritation of waiting for a light to change, she said. He initiated a study that determined how much idling at a stoplight costs motorists, she recalled.
Even then, Baliles was a politician eyeing greener pastures. He was elected attorney general in 1981, scoring a mild upset, then won a fierce nominating fight over Lt. Gov. Richard J. Davis in 1985.
Davis, with the backing of the party establishment and two big voting blocs, blacks and labor, was supposed to win.
But Baliles concentrated on less reliably Democratic rural and suburban areas, presented himself as the most electable candidate, and forged an alliance with the party's candidate for lieutenant governor, L. Douglas Wilder.
Helped by an early television advertising campaign, Baliles scored an easy victory over Republican Wyatt B. Durrette on a day when flooding in the western part of the state depressed turnout.
As a politician, Baliles was helped by a photographic memory. Aides recalled how he could walk into a room and remember the name of everyone he was introduced to.
As governor, Baliles hit the ground running, making a highly symbolic walk through the Virginia Department of Transportation with his new transportation team already at his side on his first day in office.
But transportation was not his only focus.
With a clear sense of what he wanted them to do, Baliles created commissions on transportation, education, world trade and child care.
He had the benefit of a flush economy, which provided ample tax revenues, and a General Assembly still dominated by members of his own Democratic Party.
Northern Virginia, particularly, was booming as the high-tech sector began to expand there.
At the beginning of the 1980s, per capita income in Virginia was $9,800 and the state ranked only 26th in the nation, recalled Curry A. Roberts, secretary of economic development under Baliles. By 1988, per capita income had almost doubled to $17,500 and the state ranked ninth.
In education, Baliles was able to increase teacher salaries to within $400 of the national average - the closest to the national average they've ever been, said Donald J. Finley, who was secretary of education. (They now are $3,000 below the national average.)
Baliles introduced the first testing standards in education - a Literacy Passport test for all sixth-graders to see whether they qualified for the seventh grade. Still controversial, those passport tests have been pushed aside by the Standards of Learning.
He also promoted guidance counselors in elementary schools and a family- life education course, still controversial measures among conservatives.
Suzanne F. Thomas, a member of the State Board of Education under Baliles, recalled they generated so much letter-writing that her overburdened mail carrier requested that she rent a post office box.
In the face of opposition, "the governor gave us his unstinting support," Thomas recalled. "He never wavered."
Seeing early the impact of globalization, Baliles created a Department of World Trade - later eliminated by his successor, Wilder - and concentrated his efforts on international trade.
Constantly promoting the Port of Hampton Roads, he created an inland port for container shipments at Front Royal and led eight trade missions abroad.
To emphasize the importance to Virginia of world trade, Baliles ordered installed in every seventh-grade classroom in Virginia an over-sized map of the world, showing Virginia's strategic location.
Baliles also concentrated on environmental issues, separating the secretariat of natural resources from the secretariat of economic development, where it often had been overshadowed.
He created a new Department of Waste Management and a Pesticide Control Board, and pushed for a ban on phosphates in detergents, which were hurting Virginia's freshwater reservoirs.
He didn't try to do everything at once. Eva Teig Hardy, who was his secretary of health and human resources, said when she took the job, Baliles told her it would be two years before he would be able to funnel additional money to the agency.
In the meantime, he wanted her to reorganize the management of the agency so it would have credibility when he asked the General Assembly to raise the agency's budget, she said. In 1988, he proposed increasing the budget by 26 percent to focus on mental health and child care services and the legislature agreed.
While widely acclaimed as one of the most progressive in Virginia's modern history, Baliles' tenure had its setbacks.
In 1989 there was a violent coal strike in Southwest Virginia where Baliles had to send state troopers to keep order. Feelings were so high that the governor was advised not to journey to the area.
"With the vision of hindsight we could have put a more human face on that," Roberts recalled.
He failed in an effort to give Northern Virginia more taxing authority. A proposed tax on hospital beds to raise money for indigent care was killed.
In his last year in office the economy collapsed, and Baliles left Wilder with a $2 billion budget deficit.
Virginia's 65th governor is now a senior partner at the Richmond law firm of Hunton & Williams, where he specializes in aviation and international law. His political appearances are largely limited to scolding successor governors for not raising taxes to make investments in Virginia's future.
Baliles was the fifth governor to be reviewed at the annual conference.
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