by Jan Reid
She turned to the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling that the system of public school finance was unconstitutional.
After all the years you have struggled with the beast of school finance, you know better than I do that it is a devil of a task. But the payoff makes all the effort worth it. We are working for that little guy who was carrying a Ninja Turtle backpack as he walked to school with his buddies this morning, past the ice houses and modest homes of San Antonio’s West Side, and for that little girl in the saddle oxfords who rode with her friends in a car pool Suburban past the manicured lawns of Highland Park. For both of them. They both deserve a chance.
She was saying that the court’s unanimous decision was going to force the legislators and her administration to confront the fact that the funding disparity was nothing less than a clash between those school districts that were privileged and those that were not.
You know, we have perpetrated a hoax about local control. The hoax has been that school districts had control because they could assess and collect taxes. In fact, state government usurped their power years ago with mandates that require local tax increases and regulations that turn local educators into Austin-controlled robots.
She left a pause after throwing down those challenges to the legislators, and then turned to the environment. Every major city in the state was dealing with critical levels of air pollution. In addition to threatening the health of its residents, the pollution put the cities in danger of noncompliance with the Clean Air Act, which could lead to a cutoff of federal highway funds. Texas was the worst state in the in the country in the Environmental Protection Agency’s inventory of toxic polluters. She voiced support for land commissioner Garry Mauro’s alternative-fuels programs, especially the use of compressed natural gas as a motor fuel, which could help urban areas curb the air pollution caused by vehicle traffic. She further praised Mauro’s legislation regarding coastal protection and oil spills. And she said her administration was going to close the “revolving door” that shuttled former officials into cushy jobs with the industries they had been charged with regulating.
In one of the thunderbolts that drew loud applause but also set some of the legislators and lobbyists buzzing with concern, she promised:
We are getting serious about hazardous waste. No more will hazardous waste facilities be rammed through the permit process, over the objections of local communities. No more will they be located near schools or residential areas or water supplies. We are calling on the Water Commission and the Air Control Board today to institute a two-year moratorium on permits for new commercial hazardous waste incinerators, cement kilns, or injection wells involving salt domes.
Turning to crime and punishment, she promised that the construction of prisons with enough space for 27,000 new beds would be finished within the next two years. (Twelve thousand had been built during the Clements administration.)
But we will go further. We will ask the hard questions about the roots of crime—in social discontent and despair, in poverty, in racial oppression and ignorance, in suffering and deprivation. We won’t excuse criminal behavior; we cannot wait until we understand crime before we protect our citizens from its dire consequences. But we would be foolish if we did not try to dig up the fetid soil where criminal behavior takes root.
The day after Ann’s inauguration, she and a small group of her policy advisers had decided that the first fight they were going to pick was with the insurance industry and the state board appointed by Bill Clements.
Just last week, after I pressed the board to hold off on a 30 percent auto rate increase, they announced a delay so they could audit the data the industry had given them. Isn’t that what they are supposed to be doing all along?
That line got the whoops of laughter Ann wanted. In a big chair behind her, Bob Bullock was watching with apparent admiration how the legislators watched her. She went on:
The board’s rubber-stamp increases have cost Texans millions of dollars. The board has also refused to protect consumers from failing and disreputable insurance companies. Its foot-dragging response to insolvencies has earned the ire of a grand jury as well as of independent management and financial experts. The State Auditor has warned that more than $3 billion in premiums are at risk today because of the state board’s mismanagement. This gross neglect of duty must stop now.
Then came her boldest power play. She demanded that Clements’s holdover appointees to the State Board of Insurance resign one week after her speech, and warned that if they did not, she would move to put the regulatory body under the direction of a conservator.
I am determined that the State Board of Insurance will protect the public interest of Texans. Older Texans on fixed incomes, young families, small business owners—they all must be assured that the State Board of Insurance is working for them.
Many senators and representatives were on their feet, applauding. She challenged them to approve bills that scrapped the overlapping terms of boards and commissions and would allow future governors to appoint a majority of board members during their first year in office. She closed with an anecdote about her first days in office.
When I moved in the Governor’s Mansion the other day I found a gallon of honey waiting for me. Attached to it was a hand-written note on a scrap of paper. The hand that wrote that note was old and shaky. It was written by a man who had worked hard all his life but didn’t mind sharing some of the fruits of his hard labor. The note said, “We believe we finally have a governor who cares about ordinary people and the poor.”
As we begin the task of building a New Texas, I promise myself one thing: I will always try to remember that beekeeper’s hope. . . . I intend to remember that man and his hope that we will make a difference in his life.
In that speech, Ann reached for a great deal more than she could achieve, and she rubbed some powerful men the wrong way. Lieutenant Governor Bullock and a prominent senator, Lubbock’s John Montford, were offended that she hadn’t consulted them in advance about her threat to place the insurance board into conservatorship if two members did not resign. Bullock found out about it from a staffer the night before the speech. But the veteran reporter and Capitol observer Sam Kinch wrote that it was the most dramatic speech in Texas government since John Connally launched his administration in 1963. It was not the mark of a governor wounded by a brutal campaign and intimidated by poor opinions of her character in the polls.
The insurance fight proved ugly. Before it was over, dozens of employees of the insurance commission would be ordered to turn in their keys and pagers and be out of the building by the end of the day. Ann appointed her friend Claire Korioth to chair the commission and applied hardball pressure to get the resignation of holdover appointees of Clements. One of them was not just any Austin banker with a receding hairline. He was James Saxton, a former All-American running back for the University of Texas. He had been an undersized and electrifying jitterbug runner on the first national-championship-contending team of Darrell Royal, who contributed to his lore with a tale that when Saxton was a teenager working on a farm during the summers, he would jump off a tractor and run down jackrabbits for fun.
Symbolically, Ann couldn’t have picked a more dangerous fight with the Texas establishment—with white males—than by singling out James Saxton. So this was what her New Texas was about, the old guard steamed.
Saxton stood his ground for a couple of weeks and then resigned, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family and wasn’t cut out for politics. Ann wrote to a House committee with oversight of the commission and agency:
My interest is in having an Insurance Board that will be responsive to business and individual taxpayers in this state. During recent months, I have expressed concern about the direction of the agency and structural constraints that make it difficult for an incoming governor to change the direction of the agency without having a majority of appointees on the Board. Mr. Saxton’s resignation will provide that opportunity and I am grateful
to him for this decision. I have known Mr. Saxton for many years and consider him an honorable man of high integrity. My disagreement with the State Board of Insurance does not involve Mr. Saxton personally. I wish him nothing but good will in his future endeavors.
Her State of the State speech was a rousing success, but the insurance companies and the Chemical Council were gathering forces and lobbying money in preparation for a long-term battle. But Ann had done something extraordinary in just one month: she had completely reversed the public perception of a bloodied candidate who had things in her past she wanted to hide. Her public approval ratings soared higher than those that Bill Clements and Mark White had enjoyed at any time during their terms. She received more than 3,600 letters during her first month in office; they were flooding in at five times the rate Clements’s administration had seen in the last year of his term.
Nine days after her speech, the Houston Chronicle ran a telling photograph about the permit request of a company called HIFI (Hunter Industrial Facilities, Inc.), which wanted to open and operate the state’s largest hazardous-waste disposal site in an underground salt cavern between the small East Texas towns of Dayton and Huffman. The applicant maintained that the toxic waste could not possibly leak out of the cavern into the region’s groundwater. But the Texas Water Commission agreed to the governor’s moratorium on such permits for at least eight months, even if not the two years she wanted. This was not the kind of public-relations fight that a company like HIFI could win. The Chronicle photo showed two smiling children, a boy and a girl, running through a pasture with a large billboard in the background. It said: “Thank You! Governor Ann, for Protecting Our Children from Poisonous-Toxic Waste. Families Against Contaminated Environment.”
CHAPTER 22
Ethicists
Paul Burka, the Texas Monthly political writer, thought he was watching Ann destroy her political career the night of the debate when she refused to say whether she had ever used illegal drugs. What a difference a year could make: the magazine’s headline over his story about her first months as governor sang of her as “Ann of a Hundred Days.” Burka gushed that she was the first governor in “goodness knows when” to have a true vision for the state: “She has turned an office from one that’s supposed to be weak—the Texas governor has no direct control over state agencies and doesn’t even get to appoint a majority to their boards for at least two years—into one with muscle. . . . Ann Richards is a politician, in the true sense of the word—someone skilled in using the political process. She is the first governor since the fifties to push her agenda by testifying at legislative hearings.”
Burka relayed some concerns, though: “The biggest threat in this regard [if voters ever get the idea that her values exclude traditional Texas notions] is not Richards herself but ideologues and advocates around her. Some are members of her policy council, a group of around ten staffers with individual control over areas like budget, crime, education, energy, environment, insurance, economic development, and human services. Any outsider with a problem in one of those areas has to go through the appropriate policy-council member. No one else on the staff is supposed to intervene; everyone has been admonished to ‘stay in your lane.’ This doesn’t sit well with business lobbyists, who are used to dealing with fixers but—to hear them tell, at least—now find themselves forced to deal with purists.”
Passing the torch of opportunity for women in politics and public service are, from left, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ann Richards, and Lady Bird Johnson in 1993. Governor Richards introduced the speech of Clinton, who was then First Lady and later a U.S. senator from New York, presidential candidate, and secretary of state.
Nonetheless, Burka ended his piece with a scene in which Ann saw a group of friends at the Capitol, threw her arms wide, and hollered, “Isn’t it great I’m here?”
She made speeches or took questions in press conferences thirty times in the first thirty-one days of her term. When she testified at legislative hearings, her aides made sure she was seated front and center. In addition to wrestling with issues as complex as prison crises, the financing of public education, and budgetary shortfalls, she roamed the state addressing the Texas Chamber of Commerce, the Texas Abortion Rights Action League, the Texas Association of Rural Schools, the Communications Workers of America, a Boy Scout convention, the Commission for the Blind, the South by Southwest Music Festival, and the Texas Bluebonnet Queen pageant.
She stressed again and again that the top priorities of her administration were to open doors that had been closed, to bring new people with fresh ideas into leadership roles, and to serve as a model of ethics in government. She knew that her appointments were the source of her real power, and she put people with high profiles in important places. Frank Erwin had personified the old-school University of Texas Board of Regents. Erwin thought he alone ran the state’s flag-ship university, and in chasing off a slew of gifted left-leaning academics who had been recruited by president and chancellor Harry Ransom, he pretty well proved that he did. Ann appointed as regents the Reverend Zan Holmes, a highly respected black Methodist pastor in Dallas, and Bernard Rapoport, who used the fortune he had made from a Waco-based insurance company to agitate for countless liberal causes, such as bankrolling the muckraking Texas Observer. Those appointments sent a message to the university’s scholars that under her watch, the regents were not going to impose conservative political dogma and dictate the range of their teaching and research.
Ann was in a much stronger position than her narrow victory over Williams suggested, for Democrats held strong majorities in both the Senate and the House, and committee chairmen were willing to follow her lead. Ann blasted the Commerce Department’s board and administrators for spending $16.5 million on European and other travel junkets between 1988 and 1991. Bill Clements had nominated his secretary of state (and gubernatorial also-ran) Jack Rains to be director of the department, and Rains had been one of the high rollers on those junkets. The Senate heeded the governor’s wishes and “busted” his nomination. She said the treatment of Rains, like that of the insurance commissioner James Saxton, had not been of a political nature.
The loudest partisan exchange erupted over Clements’s proposed appointment of Karl Rove as a regent of East Texas State University, which later became Texas A&M–Commerce. One might wonder why Rove would want such a backwater appointment, but he did. He considered himself an intellectual, and he was sensitive about failing to get a college degree while scrabbling his way upward in GOP politics. Senator Bob Glasgow, a Democratic former district attorney, took the lead in quizzing him. Without much success, Glasgow tried to get Rove to talk about the widely reported story that he had planted a listening device in his own office while working for the 1986 Clements campaign, intending to blame it on Mark White. But the politico grew flustered when Glasgow asked, “How long have you known an FBI agent named Greg Rampton?”
“Ah, Senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?”
Glasgow said Rove knew what the word meant and pressed him to answer the question. “Ah,” Rove said, “I know I would not recognize Greg if he walked in the door. We have talked on the phone . . . a number of times. Ah, and he has visited me in my office once or twice. But we do not have a social or personal relationship whatsoever.”
Glasgow persisted. “Do you know why Agent Rampton conducted a criminal investigation of Garry Mauro at a time you were involved in [opposition to] that campaign? Why he pulled the financial records of Bob Bullock at the time you were involved in that campaign? Why he pulled the campaign records of Jim Hightower at the time you were involved in that campaign?” The committee chairman banged his gavel as the men tried to shout each other down.
Glasgow turned to higher education funding and the state budget. “Senator,” Rove cried, “I’m a nominee for the board of East Texas State University, not the comptroller or Legislative Budget Board.”
Laredo’s Judith Zaffirini took her turn: “I was told that you
made a statement that you do not expect to be confirmed by the Texas Senate but that you welcome the opportunity to ‘confront’ this Democratic body.” Rove denied it: “I did say that I did not think I’ve got a particularly good chance of getting confirmed in the Senate, [considering] all your declarations that you’ve got twenty votes in your back pocket to bust me.”
“I don’t even have a back pocket, sir. My pocket’s up front.”
Rove’s nomination received some Democratic support on the Senate floor, but was rejected by a vote of 16–13. “He’s simply not qualified,” Zaffirini stated as a parting shot. “It’s not a question of vengeance or vendetta.”
Opening up state government was the promise on which Ann best delivered. In the first 100 days of her term, she made 384 appointments: 192 men and 192 women. Fifty-four percent were white, 25 percent were Hispanic, and 21 percent were black. Those percentages roughly matched the state’s demographics without resorting to quotas, she proudly said, and most were highly qualified for the jobs. (She had to hedge on that claim over a few who did not work out. Ann appointed a man to the Pest Control Board who was subsequently arrested for murdering his wife and burying her in an oil barrel in their backyard. An emissary from the governor’s office hustled to the jail to see him and ask him to resign. At first the man resisted; he may have thought it would help to have his seat on the board as an inferred character reference.)
Despite the long friendship between Molly Ivins and Ann, Molly blasted Ann in one of her Dallas Times Herald columns for accepting $300,000 in campaign cash and loans from a controversial plaintiffs’ lawyer and then appointing him to one of the most sought-after boards in state government. “Lest anyone assume that Governor Richards walks on water,” Molly wrote, “I point out that among her many fine appointments is one big fat awful one, made for the tawdriest of reasons. P. U. This lawyer, Walter Umphrey from Beaumont, whom Richards appointed to the Parks and Wildlife Commission, has a grim environmental record. Talk about a fox guarding the hen coop.” The man was notorious, Molly wrote, for destroying wetlands, which in his neck of the woods were customarily called swamps.
