"As the confetti dropped and candidate Steve Beshear took the stage as governor-elect on Nov. 6 in Frankfort, his staff looked relieved to get the draining final days of a campaign behind them. Situations such as these call for a week or two resting away from work, but unfortunately for the staff of any newly elected governor — and perhaps for the commonwealth as a whole — Kentucky's constitution provides no rest for the weary.
According to the state constitution, five weeks following Election Day is the governor's inauguration, while the constitutional officers aren't sworn into office until January. A lot more is jammed into those five weeks than just who sits where in the office; first a governor's transition team must be formed to decide who gets to even have a seat.
Daniel Groves, who served as outgoing Gov. Ernie Fletcher's chief of staff during the 2003 transition and first year in office, said the tight timeframe between election and inauguration "is a pretty arduous task to try to undertake this kind of transition in five weeks... but you do it; you've just got to get it done.
"Once the votes are counted, the very next day that task suddenly sort of weighs much, much heavier on your shoulders," Groves said.
There are the obvious tasks, such as hiring cabinet secretaries and filling in a governor's main support staff, but for Groves, he realized he missed some details before he even walked into the Capitol for his first day of work.
"I asked somebody, 'Where do I park?' And they said, 'You're the chief of staff; you park where you want, and then you tell the rest of the staff where they park,'" he said.
"You're dealing with everything from a complete reorganization of state government, reducing the cabinets... to things as insignificant or minor as parking. I was involved in all of that," he said.
Currently involved in all of that is Jim Cauley, Beshear's campaign manager turned chief of staff. Three years ago, in the same positions for Sen. Barack Obama, Cauley said he fielded 800 resumes for just 18 full-time and four part-time jobs, an infinitesimal amount when compared to the jobs a governor's administration must fill. To deal with the influx, the transition team has launched the Web site www.BeshearTransition.com.
"Just wading through resumes has been one of the things that, having the technology now that it is, we will have a Web site up where we can presort and database these things," Cauley said.
Both Groves and Cauley said while the structure of government and what positions will be needed may be thought about in the waning days of a race, any decision on who is going to get which job isn't discussed until after the votes are tallied.
"It wasn't something we put time, energy and effort towards before Election Day," Cauley said.
"You can't identify those people in advance, but you have to have somebody focused on it," Groves said. "And if you start trying to identify people in advance, it gets very difficult to keep the whole thing quiet so you can stay focused on the campaign."
Now that the votes have been tallied, it is time to get to work on the state's budget. Naming the state's new budget director and Finance Cabinet secretary among the first officials shows the need to have some shift of focus while the transition is going on to craft the state's biennial budget that needs to be presented in mid-January.
"You might have a campaign staff that is dead tired immediately after the election, but that's when you have a transition team that has fresher legs, who is prepared to step in and implement the plan," Groves said.
Groves said he tried to get away to Florida for a few days before the inauguration, but spent it looking out a window at a pool, and Cauley plans to go on his honeymoon following his New Year's wedding.
"It is difficult to think clearly if you are just dead tired and have lost your focus as a result of being so tired. So you have to spend just a little bit of time trying to refresh yourself," Groves said about his transition experience.
Given all the factors of the constricting five-week transition, Cauley said finding the greatest people on earth for each job wouldn't make a difference with this budget because of the austere condition of the state's finances. "I don't think talent and people change that; it's there," he said. But nonetheless, Beshear's budget director, long-time budget office employee Mary Lassiter, is already at work, as Cauley said Fletcher's people offered space so work on Beshear's budget could begin.
"My biggest fear right now is disappointing a lot of people who think there's going to be a lot of ability to do things and hire people and do (a number of wanted projects). I think it is going to be a pretty tough year for us as far as being able to do anything for anybody (because of a tight budget.)"
Time crunch from election to inauguration to presentation of a budget could use some tweaking, Cauley and Groves said, but it may not be worth the political capital needed to push for the constitutional amendment required to change it.
"I don't know that it hinders the commonwealth from moving forward, but no incoming governor would choose it to be that way if they had the option," Groves said.
"Would (Kentucky) benefit? I would imagine yes," Cauley said about the state's condition if incoming governors and their appointees were given more time to settle in before drafting their first budget. "Are you going to get it changed or are we going to try? I'd doubt it. You play the cards you're dealt, not the ones you want to be dealt."
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