Petro says what had to be said: Ohio has to change

There, Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro has said it: Ohio's body of public employees is top-heavy. There are too many managers being paid to manage too many splintered departments.
Almost lost last week among all the post-election coverage, was Petro's speech before the Ohio council of Retail Merchants during which he unveiled his plan for reshaping Ohio government.
The plan, obviously, will be the cornerstone of Petro's campaign for Ohio governor in 2006, and as such it is a good example of how politics is supposed to work. It is a candidate's serious look at the overarching issue in the next gubernatorial campaign -- the state's crippled budget.
Of course in Ohio jobs are an issue, education is an issue, public safety is an issue. But the state can't properly address any of those issues if it doesn't get its financial house in order. Unlike the federal government, Ohio -- like most states -- can't run a deficit. It can't borrow its way out of a budget crunch. California recently got around that problem by putting a bond issue on the ballot to cover its shortfall, but that's bad public policy. It simply isn't right to shift the cost of tax cuts and overspending to the next generation, whether it is done by the federal government or a state government.
The challenges facing the state are formidable, and some costs are going to be very difficult to control. For instance, Medicaid now consumes nearly 40 percent of the state's resources. But attempts to rein in those costs in the past have been met with vociferous opposition from the nursing home lobby. Unless action is taken, however, Medicaid would consume every penny the state takes in.
Petro says he will address the Medicaid problem in one of several future position papers, and we look forward to that. His initial salvo was fired at the bureaucracy, and it should get people in Columbus talking.
He notes that Ohio has 23 cabinet level departments and over 270 boards and commissions. What Petro doesn't say is that many of those boards and commissions have been used to reward political cronies and, especially since term limits went into effect, have become the feeding troughs for legislators who were term-limited out of office. Eliminating them will not be easy even if the state is staring squarely into the face of a $4 billion or $5 billion biennial budget shortfall.
Petro says reshaping government could reduce the state's workforce by 11,500 employees and save the state more than $1 billion. He says restructuring the Department of Education could eliminate 575 jobs; the Department of Public Safety, 1,030; the Department of Health, 2,100; and the Department of Transportation, 1,350.
This is all worth talking about, even Petro's suggestion that the state Department of Development could be privatized to eliminate 467 positions. Privatization government services has not proven to be the bonanza that had been anticipated -- in prisons on the state level or in supplying troops on the federal level, for instance.
Also, Petro suggests that the state should force itself to get by without extending the emergency 1 cent sales tax next year. Perhaps it should, but we don't think it could. The looming sea of red ink facing the state is just to great. Even if all of Petro's proposals were implemented and if they all saved as much as he's suggesting, the savings would represent only a fourth of state's anticipated shortfall.
Still, Petro's proposals provide the impetus for other state leaders to begin taking the financial crisis the state faces more seriously.