Well, it is bad to have to say so and I am not sure that I want to say so
for public attribution but it was a large part looking for places to put
money that would not be
Page 10 wasted but would not be
recurring, so that you didn't get yourself into trouble later
in your administration just approach the budget. If you had asked me in
October what I was going to spend money on, I would have talked about
education I know. Public schools a lot, talk about the university a lot,
might have mentioned the community colleges in passing, but not to the
extent that we ended up doing. Certainly not the parks. Because while I
knew that we were behind in park acquisitions I had always as a
legislator thought that because we had so much of the state that had
federal parks the fact that we had such a low amount of state park land
wasn't as bad an indictment as some people tried to make it.
And we probably made a mistake in not, I say made a mistake
I'll back up and say, the circumstances turned out to have
made the acquisition of all that extra park land subject to second
guessing because once you buy it you have got to have operating money to
operate. When we got the money appropriated to buy it, we knew it would
take time to get it so that you could operate it. So the money for
operations really wasn't much in that first biennial budget.
By the time 1975 came along and that would normally started to kick in,
we had gone into a recession and the energy crisis and all that and the
money wasn't there. It never got the kind of operating
support that it should have had and there was a lot of publicity about
it, probably during Hunt's second administration maybe. About
the fact that we had all this park land out there that was just letting
go to the dogs, that we weren't maintaining it right, or
operating it right. That was just sort of a left over from the
circumstances of '75, the energy crisis and all that. I
personally thought and I still think that the state had the highway
funds for road paving and had the general fund for everything else and
that the main purpose of that general fund ought to be education. It has
always been that way and the public schools needed more and we are still
Page 11 struggling with that. And time will tell
whether the current education initiatives are going to be proven to be
the answer. We have the tendency to try new initiatives but not to keep
it going long enough to see if it really works. A lot of people say we
just keep pouring money into it and nothing gets better and it is hard
to say that whether if you didn't spend the money things
would have gotten a lot worse. I think the main focus I had was because
of background was on the university and the education system. I thought
we had enough fat in the budget that we could cut some. I did what a lot
of governors around the country do, we got some people to come in and
they organized an efficiency study. We got Archie Davis to head up a
commission and his name alone was going to give that credibility. The
commission came in and businesses loaned people to come in and do the
study in the various departments. The records are pretty solid that we
saved about, ended up changes, that resulted in about 80 million
(dollars) a year which at that time was a lot and still a lot of money
but it was more money then than it is now.