A mighty fine choice, indeed

If we’re going to have a state treasurer as a constitutionally independent elected office, which we shouldn’t, then Gov. Mike Beebe made the perfect choice Wednesday in filling the vacancy with Charles Robinson.

For nearly three decades, until retiring in 2007, the 66-year-old Robinson was the director of the Division of Legislative Audit.

That’s a strange and vital hybrid agency comprising a couple hundred accountants. It functions formally as a legislative arm while functioning, in fact, as the state’s executive auditor.

Running it for more than a quarter-century and keeping it apolitical and credible while deflecting legislative pressure and enduring state agency anger over unfavorable audits … well, let’s just say that making the needed minor repairs to the tiny and normally inconsequential treasurer’s office will be a relative snap.

Robinson, a certified public accountant himself, needs only to examine and evaluate personnel, establish a transparent and detached procedure for investing state dollars in bonds and other instruments, then keep an alert eye out for brush fires as he waits for January 2015 when we’ll get a new elected treasurer and he can retire from state government for the second time.

I predict he’ll have that place straightened out inside a month and that we’ll hear nothing more about or from him, which was the case for all those years when he ran Legislative Audit.

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This matter serves to demonstrate-forgive me, voters-that a governor can pick a minor manager like this better than the electorate can.

For one thing, a guy like Charles Robinson is never going to run for statewide office. People like Martha Shoffner do that.

That is one reason why I’ve long argued-and this would be a good time to re-argue-that we need to abolish the offices of treasurer, auditor, land commissioner (and I’d add lieutenant governor and secretary of state, which I admit to being a possible over-reach) as elected independent statewide constitutional offices.

We should let the governor pick somebody to manage the small treasurer’s office as well as the state auditor’s office, which doesn’t audit. We should merge them into the governor’s executive agency, Finance and Administration.

We ought to put the silly land commissioner’s mundane filings into some land-management or tax-management agency.

State Building Services could manage the state Capitol. Assorted executive agencies could assume the secretary of state’s menial record-keeping duties.

The lieutenant governor exists only to become governor in case of a vacancy, and we could designate somebody else for that-the speaker of the House, maybe, since Davy Carter wants the job and could handle it just fine, though he lacked the nerve to run for it.

And another thing: The partisan disposition of these seven statewide constitutional offices, meaning the five minor ones I’ve scorned along with governor and attorney general, determines the majority party for purposes of dominance of county election commissions.

That’s absurd. The legislative makeup more aptly determines the real majority party.

The reason we have this dissipation of state executive authority into a variety of silly little offices is that the early leaders of our state, writing the 1874 Constitution, were deathly afraid of consolidated power.

So we end up with a governor who can’t sustain a veto because only a simple-majority vote is required to override. And we end up with a governor who has to keep his management hands off such things as the simple depositing of state dollars.

The founders of our state deemed it better to leave that kind of thing to Martha Shoffner so that Mike Beebe wouldn’t have too much power.

How did that work for us?

Last week Beebe gathered the couple of dozen treasurer’s office employees and told them to hang tough and that he was there to help them if they needed anything, and that he’d be getting them a new boss in a few days.

It was a nice gesture, if unconstitutional.

Beebe had no constitutional authority to tell the independent treasurer’s employees diddly.

Why, that was an unconstitutional power grab, don’t you see?

On Wednesday, Beebe was careful to say that Robinson, upon taking the oath of office in a few minutes, would thereby become wholly independent of him.

That’ll work fine in the case of Robinson, though it would work just as well-more efficiently, even-if Robinson were working as a governor’s cabinet member, like the similarly veteran and respected Richard Weiss at Finance and Administration. At least Shoffner’s resignation enabled the governor to pick a treasurer, a mighty fine one.

At least our Constitution trusted him to do that much.

Thus this episode serves to advance my argument that consolidated governor’s oversight is a far better executive model.

The key would be to keep doing a better job electing a governor than we’ve done electing a treasurer.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.