WHEN FOLKS DROP by Gov. Mark Sanford’s “Open Door After 4” events, they often complain about problems at agencies that are run by other elected officials or by unelected boards, many of which neither the governor nor anyone else can influence. He sheepishly explains that there’s nothing he can do to help. Or it must seem sheepish to the people complaining, many of whom no doubt leave convinced that he’s just blowing them off.

He’s not.

In most states, the buck stops with the governor. But not in South Carolina.

In South Carolina, the governor gets blamed for public education and the environment and law enforcement and the sorry state of our highways, but he has no direct control — and very little indirect control — over any of those matters.

Neither does the Legislature. It has the power to write laws and spend money, but those are tools for affecting policy, usually in the long term, not for making sure that the policy is implemented on a rainy Thursday morning. No legislature is capable of seeing to it that every agency operates efficiently and effectively, treats the public fairly and focuses on the right areas; after all, ours isn’t even in session half the year.

The people we elect to run state agencies usually are dedicated to the job, but they have little incentive to subordinate their own agency’s interests to the overall good of the state; indeed, they have every reason not to do that, because it could lower their profile and harm their future political ambitions. The part-time members of boards and commissions that oversee other agencies often have too many demands from their regular jobs to do this one well; even if they have time, they’re almost completely insulated from accountability.

What all this means is that the public has no control over how most state agencies operate, because the government answers to no one.

The logical person to put in charge of state agencies is the governor — the person whom the public focuses on as the theoretical head of the state.

But we haven’t been able to shake off the political culture of the 1700s, when the nascent legislature wrested power from the Lords Proprietors and colonial governors and vowed never to give it back.

Let the governor appoint more agency heads, the defenders of the 18th century status quo declare, and we’ll be at the mercy of an uncontrollable dictator!

What little faith these critics have in themselves.

No one proposes to turn the entire government over to the governor, to do with as he will. The idea is merely to put him in charge of the agencies that make up the executive branch. Granted, that’s where nearly all our tax money goes; but it’s not where the power resides.

We would still have a Legislature that could defund the governor’s programs, reject his proposals, reverse his declarations and even outlaw his actions. We would still have a judiciary that could slap him back into place if he oversteps his authority. We’d also have someone the public could credit when our government gets the job done — and blame when it falls short.

Wednesday: How boards and commissions and the long ballot make government unaccountable. Read this series and more at http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/10646771.htm.