Sanford shows way on restructuring, education funding

EVEN TRIMMED down for sharper focus, Gov. Mark Sanford’s fifth State of the State address offers something for everyone to like and something for everyone to dislike. But two initiatives rise above the rest and deserve special legislative attention.

The first obviously is the governor’s continuing campaign to reform an executive branch of government that is too bulky and autonomous to operate efficiently or consistently in the public’s interest. There is no question that overhauling the post-Reconstruction government is, as Mr. Sanford put it, “the number one thing we could do this year to better our state government — and in turn people’s lives.”

That starts with transforming the Department of Transportation from an arrogant cesspool of secret back-scratching and self-dealing into a Cabinet agency whose director cannot act as an island unto herself. As Mr. Sanford explained, while “the deliberation of ideas is well done by a committee,” you can’t put a committee in charge of executing those ideas, as lawmakers tried to do with the Transportation Commission, because “if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.”

Letting the governor appoint most constitutional officers, consolidating our breathtakingly duplicative health agencies and creating an actual central administrative agency are all long-overdue reforms that will eliminate waste and help state agencies work together toward a common goal of better serving the public. But if lawmakers can’t clean up the agency where the Legislature’s own auditors uncovered lavish contracts with the well-connected, high-level favoritism and a concerted effort to deceive the Legislature, then we might as well just give up and admit that the primary goal of our state government is not to serve the public but to serve those in power.

While restructuring can make our government work better, nothing can do more to transform our state than disentangling the quality of education a child receives from where he lives. On Wednesday, Mr. Sanford embraced that change when he called for all school funding to be distributed using a weighted formula, which takes into account the difficulties of educating children from impoverished backgrounds.

It would be significant for any governor to advocate that change, but it’s all the more important coming from the man most associated with efforts to undermine public education. Mr. Sanford makes no bones about his belief that a single-funding formula could remove some of the technical barriers to his private-choice dreams, but what of it? The political obstacles to those plans are far greater than the technical ones. Moreover, we will never turn our state into a place where businesses want to locate and people want to live until we educate all of our children, and we will never do that until we fund our schools based on the needs of the students rather than the wealth of a given community.

Together, these two initiatives have great potential to improve the lives of all South Carolinians for generations to come. It is of no small import that they were included in a speech in which Mr. Sanford went to great lengths to mend strained relations with legislators. We hope they will accept his olive branches, and set about working to make those vital changes.