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Someone’s looking into it
A plethora of commissions will recommend new policies and laws next year
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

LIKE ANY CORPORATE-takeover artist, Governor Mitt Romney quickly identified a whole bunch of things that he thought his new company — er, government — could be doing better shortly after he took charge. Criminal justice, for example. Education. Child care. Homelessness. Workforce diversity. A lot of things.

Being more of a big-picture guy, Romney wisely looks to the experts to work out the details for him. So, he has convened a multitude of commissions, task forces, and councils. Some have already completed their work, but many will report their findings and recommendations during the coming year.

A few in particular are worth watching in 2004. One is the Governor’s Council on Capital Punishment, which Romney announced with great fanfare in September. It is supposed to report back in the spring with a plan to bring narrowly applied capital punishment to the Commonwealth, using modern forensic science to ensure that innocent people are not executed. If the council’s plan is a home run, Romney could have an innovative, popular initiative tailor-made for any national campaign he might one day undertake.

Like capital punishment, affirmative action is a topic guaranteed to spark debate any time it’s touched. Romney assembled a Diversity and Equal Opportunity Advisory Council in September to recommend ways to implement his Big Idea of increasing diversity in state-government employment. They’ll do it without old-fashioned, Dukakis-era affirmative-action; Romney nullified those longstanding executive orders, which provided strict rules for hiring and promotion within state government, before the council started its work. Romney says that the new plan will move forward from affirmative action, not backward — whatever that means — and it’s possible that he will bring back the substance of those old rules. By eliminating them beforehand, Romney ensures that whatever diversity plan he does enact after the council’s spring report will appear to be built from scratch, again potentially giving him a "Romney initiative" to tout nationwide.

The Education Task Force, created in October to brainstorm ways to help underperforming school districts, is another high-profile effort. And, as with his pre-emptive elimination of affirmative-action rules, Romney has already telegraphed the results he expects well in advance of the group’s report. The governor had barely finished introducing the 14-member task force when he blurted out his intent to offer full-day kindergarten to underachieving districts, and to demand in exchange that parents in those districts attend training classes themselves. The task force is expected to unveil those and other ideas officially just after the start of the year.

While those three councils have gained the most attention and inspired the most public discussion, they are hardly the only commissions currently seeking ways to make the Commonwealth a better place.

Early in the year, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey will reveal the results of her major effort in the administration, the Governor’s Commission on Criminal Justice Innovation. It’s been at work since July, looking at five major areas: re-entry and post-release supervision (that is, how to move ex-cons safely back into society), law-enforcement education and training, forensic sciences, urban-crime strategies, and cross-agency information sharing. So far its progress has been kept close to the vest. Some have suggested that the commission’s board and subcommittees are stacked too heavily with law-enforcement veterans, and with very few representatives of victims’ groups, minorities, and criminal defendants. Commissioners include a district attorney (Tim Cruz), a sheriff (Frank Cousins), an assistant US attorney (Mary Ann Hinkle), an FBI agent (Ken Kaiser), a probation commissioner (John O’Brien), a Boston Police superintendent (Paul Joyce), and a State Police colonel (Thomas Foley). The most controversial aspect, and toughest balance to strike, will most likely involve helping prisoners transition to the streets.

A little slower on the ball has been the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence, created by executive order in May. If it doesn’t sound new, that’s because there was a Governor’s Commission on Domestic Violence from 1992 to 2002, and a Governor’s Task Force on Sexual Assault and Abuse last year. This new commission — a popular one, with 82 commissioners — essentially picks up where those two left off, says Toni Troop, director of development for Jane Doe Inc., which has several people serving on the commission. Working committees have been established, but the two original co-chairs have both recently left their day jobs and may not be able to continue their commission work, so things may be delayed as the leadership picture evolves.

Action has taken place on the new Early Education and Care Council, co-chaired by the heads of the Office of Child Care Services, Department of Public Health, and Department of Education. A series of five regional forums took place in the fall to discuss ideas on early education, parental involvement, and funding. The council is more likely to result in subtle but important changes in the ways different state departments and agencies coordinate and streamline their functions, says OCCS spokesperson Dina Papanikolau. But the council is also likely to recommend a few concrete initiatives, such as a board of early education and care to oversee allocation of public funding. It might even meet its February 15 deadline.

It’s a little too early to judge the Massachusetts Interagency Council on Homelessness and Housing, which Romney created in November at the recommendation, naturally, of the Executive Commission on Homeless Services Coordination that he had assembled in February. When creating the Interagency Council, Romney said that he wanted to address the "patchwork approach to the problem" of homelessness. Chaired by Healey, the council began with a group of Health and Human Services administrators and then added commissioners from a host of other vaguely related departments. This is meant as a permanent body, but will be expected to recommend regulatory changes and new initiatives sometime next spring.

Although it’s not sexy, the Massachusetts Ocean Management Task Force is important. The group, chaired by former US assistant energy secretary Susan Tierney, is supposed to "provide a structure for developing ocean management plans within state waters." This has the potential to bring profitable offshore development, such as laying fiber-optic cable, sand and gravel mining, waste disposal, gas pipelines, wind farms, and aquaculture, to the state. Think of the task force as creating a zoning board for the ocean. An initial report is expected in February, but public disclosure of recommendations may come much later, after the various options have circulated within the State House.

Some commissions spring from public scrutiny rather than internal politics. When the local media scream about something — say, prison mismanagement after the August murder of defrocked priest John Geoghan (see "Shame on the Department of Correction," News and Features, August 29) — one safe response is to create a commission rather than to order immediate changes. In this case, the Governor’s Commission on Corrections Reform, chaired by former attorney general Scott Harshbarger, will look at "issues in our corrections system that could benefit from improved standards, training, and new guidelines," Romney said upon announcing the panel. By the time the commission issues its report in April, the public atmosphere may have changed, especially since the Department of Correction’s commissioner has already been replaced. It will be interesting to see what Harshbarger’s group suggests, and how open the DOC is to implementing those suggestions.

THE EXECUTIVE branch does not have a monopoly on commissions. The legislature can create them, as it sometimes does to seek alternatives to the governor’s plans. This year, lawmakers slipped into the budget the creation of a special commission to study charter-school finance and tuition; the idea is to find some middle ground between two polar-opposite arguments in education policy. The governor likes things the way they are — Chapter 70 education funds from the state get diverted from a child’s school district to whatever charter school that child enrolls in. Public educators say this is a deliberate plan to defund public education; they want districts to keep their Chapter 70 money. Few interested parties have staked out middle ground, and the impasse bodes well for keeping things as they are, so reform-minded legislators created this commission in hopes of finding a compromise. Its deadline of February 1 is probably unrealistic, given that the group hasn’t started working yet. "Historically, these deadlines aren’t exactly hard and fast," says Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, who will be consulted by the commission when it gets around to meeting. Koocher hopes that a plan will come out in time to affect the fiscal year 2005 budget discussions next spring.

That’s if the group makes a recommendation at all. "My general experience is that many of these commissions never meet," says Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. He’s a member of what he thinks is one such phantom commission now, and it’s not the first time. This one, a commission to study alternatives to property taxes for funding public education, is statutorily charged with reporting its findings by January 30. Although he’s theoretically on the commission, Widmer has yet to be contacted by anyone else from the body. Several years ago he was appointed to a commission on telecommunications taxation. The act of creating the commission was apparently enough to assuage whoever had been bellyaching about the topic; the commission never met, Widmer says, and nobody ever mentioned it again.

One impediment to any progress by the public-education-funding commission, Widmer says, is that the state needs to react to whatever the Suffolk Superior Court rules in Hancock v. Driscoll. The plaintiffs in that case — Massachusetts public-school students — presented arguments in June, exactly 10 years after the landmark McDuffy v. Secretary of the Executive Office of Education ruling declared the state responsible for the education of its students and led to implementation of the current "Chapter 70" state aid to school districts. The Hancock plaintiffs claim that local schools remain inadequate, and thus that the state has failed to enact the McDuffy requirements. Arguments should continue through February. If successful, that suit could throw the Chapter 70 funding process into disarray. "It could lead to a total revamping of funding," Widmer says.

The case’s outcome will also affect another legislative commission, this one specifically looking for ways to reconfigure how Chapter 70 distributions are calculated. The commission has submitted a draft report to legislative leaders, but actual recommendations won’t come out until next year — and they’re sure to cause a ruckus. "Chapter 70 is the Middle East crisis of Massachusetts public policy," says Koocher. "There is no way to rewrite Chapter 70 funding disbursement with all of the various different interests at stake."

Nothing has been heard yet from a special commission that was supposed to make recommendations to the legislature in November on the operation of the state’s indigent-counsel services, including who qualifies for such services and how much the state should pay the attorneys. Given the fact that fewer and fewer lawyers in the state are accepting these cases, this is an issue that should be addressed sooner rather than later.

But don’t become too cynical about commissions. It looks like the year will start with one such body suggesting a piece of legislation likely to pass and become actual law. A commission looking into skyrocketing property-tax rates appears ready to submit a proposal on January 12 that would raise the allowable difference between the rates towns charge on commercial versus residential properties. This plan, similar to a bill backed by Boston mayor Tom Menino and supported by Romney and Senate president Robert Travaglini, would allow cities like Boston, which face skyrocketing property values, to shift more of the tax burden to businesses, rescuing many homeowners from hundreds of dollars in property-tax hikes. That bill never went anywhere — House Speaker Tom Finneran was concerned about the effect it would have on businesses. But on December 17, after several days of stories in both dailies about Boston homeowners’ outrage over potential tax increases, Finneran suddenly spoke in favor of the idea. With everybody now on board, that guarantees at least one commission smooth sailing.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com


Issue Date: January 2 - 8, 2004
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