Batt At Home In Job - Even Relishes It Governor Learns To Be More Sensitive To Keeping, Cultivating Public Pulse
There’s just as much work to do. His schedule is just as jammed. But Gov. Phil Batt looks back on his hectic first year in office with a degree of satisfaction, and feeling a lot more comfortable.
“I’m on top of the job and I think that people respect the job I’m doing,” Batt said during an interview squeezed between more work on his upcoming budget and State of the State addresses and reading a Christmas story, “The Onion Journey,” on a local radio program.
“I’m proud of what I’m doing and I enjoy it. It’s a big change.”
And change is good.
In his first weeks in office, Batt was besieged by problems both inherited and of his own making. And despite receiving what he considered a mandate at the polls, Idaho’s first Republican governor in 24 years was quickly confronted by the realization that public opinion required daily maintenance and was as important to his administration’s success as being “right.”
Batt was surprised - and stung - by criticism of his January decision to allow more Navy nuclear waste to be shipped to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. Previous agreements left him no choice, he said, and it was time for a new tone of cooperation in dealing with the federal government.
He also was pilloried for asking all the members of what he considered the haughty, overly independent state Fish and Game Commission to resign. He wanted the option of keeping or replacing them, but gladly put the issue behind him after they pledged to be better team players.
“The whole experience with the nuclear question, I think, brought to my attention that I have to move as the public wishes me to and not get ahead of them, right or wrong. I have to have the public with me,” he said. “That and calling for the Fish and Game commissioners’ resignations. That was premature also. I needed to change my relationship with Fish and Game, but that was the wrong way to do it.”
Those early frustrations to some degree overshadowed Batt’s success in the Legislature as the huge Republican majority enacted his campaign promise for $40 million in property tax relief and a cap on future increases. The distractions also kept him from focusing as much as he would have liked on reorganizing state government to make it leaner.
He didn’t accomplish everything he wanted in the first year, and “a more pronounced overall attempt to efficiently organize government” is on the way. But Batt now considers the effort to rein in state bureaucracy his most significant achievement so far.
“We’re right on track. We stopped the growth of government and it’s a good thing we did because we’re in slower economic growth,” he said. “And I think that my view of government, which says that it should not grow faster than the private sector, the wisdom of that is being borne out and we need to continue it.”
Yet the past year also has strengthened Batt’s conviction that states must take over more functions that have been usurped by a less-efficient federal government.
“The only way to get that back in balance and provide the services is to have the states play a bigger role in the decision making,” he said. “I’m more convinced than ever that that has to take place. It’s not going to be a necessarily pleasant chore for the states, but it’s essential.”
Batt sometimes still chafes at criticism and is reluctant to invite the media spotlight. But the man who led the Idaho GOP back from dramatic electoral setbacks in 1990 to unprecedented success in 1994 knows that change seldom comes easily.
While immediate gratification is nice, it may no longer be so critical to a man who spent 30 years in public life before being elected to the state’s highest office.