Keeling Actually Helps Clarify Some Things
Larry Dale Keeling, rarely one to bother with using facts to elucidate things, wrote a great article this weekend explaining exactly how many political appointees Governor Beshear has made and how that number actually compares to the previous administration.
When you bore down into the numbers, you find that, of the 3,635 non-merit employees the administration cites as being on the personnel roles as of Jan. 31, 1,222 were employed by elected officials other than the governor -- commonwealth attorneys, county attorneys and the other statewide constitutional officers.
Another 672 were teachers in career and technical schools or the state schools for the blind and deaf. And 346 more were employed by agencies that, by law, operate their own personnel systems -- Kentucky Educational Television, the Council on Postsecondary Education and the Kentucky Historical Society, to name just three.
Like the teachers, the staffs of these agencies are career professionals whose tenure spans multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican. They are about as far from being political appointees as you can get in government.
When you bore all the way to the bottom line, you find that Gov. Beshear appointed just 826 of the 3,635 non-merit employees in the executive branch on Jan. 31.
This number is actually 26 higher than the previous administration, or 3.25%, so there's room to cut, as there may be in the agencies listed above. But demanding a reduction of 125 appointees entirely from the Governor's appointees, over 16% of the total, will likely harm his ability to run his government. The number should be reduced -- everyone is tightening belts -- but the Governor should also be afforded the ability to implement his policy directives, and these appointees are often (too often, unfortunately) the only staff that have the willingness and ability to do that.
