To win a vote

State Senate President Pro Tem Michael Lamoureux of Russellville and Sen. David Sanders of Little Rock, prominent Republican champions of the private-option form of Medicaid expansion, were literally begging.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

They needed to convert one of the nine “no” votes on the private option to produce a vital 27th “aye” vote to achieve the necessary three-fourths majority to pass the appropriation in the Senate.

Depending on House action, that would give the private option 12 more months of ever-tenuous life.

They were reduced, really, to one prospect-Sen. Jane English of North Little Rock, an unassuming Republican of certain Tea Party-ish proclivities.

They already knew she was among the least parochial members of the Legislature. She had made clear that she wouldn’t trade her vote for placement of the new veterans home in her district, or for any pork-barrel project.

She was telling Lamoureux and Sanders for the third or fourth time that she simply did not believe in the wisdom of the private option. Ever conservative, she saw it as a costly expansion of welfare spending that would provide a disincentive for recipients to seek work.

Actually, she said, there were reforms she had long advocated in the state’s job training and worker education programs, first as a former project manager with the state Economic Development Commission and later as a work-force services official for former Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Maybe if those reforms could be put in place, providing a better system for training private-option clients for jobs to get them off public assistance … well, she said, that would be a “game-changer” for her, but surely was too much to ask on such short notice in a fiscal-only session.

Anyway, no one-not Huckabee, not Mike Beebe-had shown much interest in her ideas before, she said.

Lamoureux, given to heroic efforts to try to pass the private option, then to fatalism and funks when those efforts seemed to be failing, walked away. He was typically distressed. He seemed forever stuck one vote short of the number he deemed essential to keep the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences from being cast into major financial trouble over uncompensated care.

Sanders continued the conversation with English. He drew her out on the job-training reforms she wanted, none of which he knew much about.

He asked English if she would vote for the private option if those reforms could be put in place. She said that, yes, she would, because then there would be a better and more logical process for helping people move from the private option to jobs, or better jobs.

Sanders took that information to the governor’s office. Beebe said the fact of the matter was that his administration had long favored the reforms English advocated and was in fact working toward them. But maybe his people could work faster.

The governor assembled several of his department heads, probably half the Cabinet, to meet over the long holiday weekend with Sanders, English and state Sen. Johnny Key of Mountain Home, vital because he was chairman of the Senate Education Committee and the issue had to do with workforce education and adult education.

It helped that what English wanted necessitated dealing with three of the more competent and effective officials in and around state government-economic-development director Grant Tennille, higher-education director Shane Broadway and Bill Stovall, head of the association of two-year colleges.

By noon Monday, everyone had agreed on as many of English’s reforms as could be implemented immediately, and had agreed further to work on the rest of them within the year.

The sum of $15 million formerly dissipated among the two-year colleges for work-force education and training would be consolidated in the Economic Development Commission for meting out on a targeted basis according to job needs.

Another $9.6 million was moved around to fund programs for college and career readiness and so-called career pathways.

A fuller legislative package to overhaul the entire system will be designed for the 2015 regular session.

English pronounced herself satisfied and unwilling to miss the opportunity to get those reforms enacted. She declared herself the 27th vote.

Everyone from Beebe on down was telling me Tuesday that the agreement was entirely positive-that what English wanted was what everyone else wanted, and that her providing impetus to expedite reforms was a good thing, and that leveraging those kinds of general statewide policies was infinitely better than trading a vote for some pork project for her district from the General Improvement Fund.

Was this mostly about what state government can do quickly when it covets a legislative vote? Yes, of course.

You have to wonder whether the Beebe administration would proceed with these laudably sensible reforms if English double-crossed them on the private option.

But this also was about a legislator who tied her vote to something more substantial than a direct, self-serving payoff. And the byproduct, everyone assured and insisted, offered the convenient lagniappe of good policy.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 15 on 02/20/2014

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