The Roemer Revolution

From fire-breathing Huey Long to high-living Edwin Edwards, Louisiana’s populist Governors have almost always pushed at the boundaries of executive power. The latest to occupy the mansion, Democrat Charles (“Buddy”) Roemer, has quickly stretched those boundaries to all but a breaking point. Since he took over from Edwards in March, the scrawny Harvard-educated chief executive has extracted from the legislature budgetary and political power rivaling that $ once held by the dictatorial Kingfish. “I’m the most powerful Governor in America,” exults the pragmatic populist as he flashes a baby-faced smile.

Unlike his predecessors, Roemer is using his new clout to dismantle the pattern of extravagant patronage and spending programs that made Louisiana seem as profligate as a Cajun on an old-time oil-patch payday. The Roemer Revolution is a drastic effort to restore solvency to a state that is, in Treasurer Mary Landrieu’s words, “flat broke.” In fact, it is worse than broke: it faces a deficit of $1.3 billion. Roemer proposes to reduce the state’s historic dependence on oil and energy revenues. Already, the tax-shy legislature has earmarked a 1 cents sales-tax increase, and may consider changing the sacred “homestead exemption,” which keeps property taxes low.

Although he is a diabetic who gives himself a shot of insulin twice a day, Roemer has been working 14-hour days seven days a week. He is trying to abolish 100 of the state’s 415 boards and commissions while cutting 16,000 people from the state’s 75,000-person payroll over four years. He is pressing for tighter environmental laws and increased spending for education, including a 5% pay raise for teachers.

Besides better fiscal management, Roemer is offering something else that Louisiana is not used to: relentless honesty in government. He has created his own muckraking department, hiring veteran Times-Picayune Investigative Reporter Bill Lynch to serve as Louisiana’s first inspector general. Lynch received enough reports of improprieties to prompt the Governor to replace all members of both the racing and the real estate commissions. Says Lynch, who is expanding his staff from twelve to 35: “If I had known as a reporter what I learned my first three days here, I could have won five Pulitzer Prizes.” Louisiana residents are encouraged to use a complaint hot line to phone in tips about waste or fraud in government — and so far, hundreds have called in.

Roemer has hardly escaped criticism. Labor and education leaders alike call him unapproachable. He has irritated teachers by suggesting that they face periodic competency reviews and surrender their system of lifelong tenure. Proposed cuts of $50 million in the state’s much admired charity hospital system have caused anxiety and protest in some localities.

Roemer has had his own moments of embarrassment — as when he was caught appointing the son of a key state senator custodian of notarial records in New Orleans, a part-time sinecure that paid its last beneficiary $105,000. Well, said the Governor when asked about this venture in old-fashioned patronage, he would move to do away with that cushy job. Ed Hardin, president of Louisiana’s Common Cause, feels Roemer is much too autocratic and tends to act without enough research. Says Hardin: “He’s assembled power that makes Huey Long look like a piker.”

In what everyone recognizes as his honeymoon period, Roemer is unapologetic about either his methods or his goals. “I was elected to fight the political establishment,” he says. He is as optimistic about his prospects as he is realistic about the size of his task. “I feel like I’m taking a company through Chapter 11,” Roemer says. “Louisiana is going to be open for business again under new management.”