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Executive Records, Governor J. Millard Tawes, 1959-1967
Volume 82, Volume 2, Page 56   View pdf image (33K)
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their policies closely related before they get to the Governor's office.
The same situation exists with the proliferation of State agencies
in the field of education, conservation of natural resources, industrial
relations, the regulation of business and professional activities, and
a number of other areas. The State's chief executive frankly needs
at least a thirty or forty-hour workday if he is to give all the attention
that he might like to the multitude of agencies and activities tied to
him by law. When a Governor is not able to devote as much time as
he desires to the administrative apparatus, department heads in-
creasingly tend to see their problems from the viewpoint of only
their own operation and not of the State as a whole. Decisions of
genuine concern to the Governor tend to be made down the line
before he has had an adequate opportunity to consider them. And
those decisions are too often not coordinated with closely related
programs in other offices. The consequences of all that can be un-
necessary management problems, economic waste and poor service
for the public.

BASIC GUIDELINES

The basic guidelines for organizing an effective, efficient administra-
tive structure are few in number and generally agreed on. I will
only summarize them here in terms in which they have been practic-
ally applied: (1) The basic plan should be as simple as possible,
and the number of separate organizational units should be held to
a minimum. 2) Related activities should be grouped together for
most effective administrative and minimum overhead cost. (3) De-
partments should be under single administrative heads to the maxi-
mum extent possible. (4) Lines of authority should be clearly defined
and the channels of communication open from top to bottom. (5) The
span of executive control required of any official should be no wider
than will permit adequate supervision of the activities immediately
under his direction. (6) Adequate staff assistance should be available
to administrators to provide continuing review of organizational and
operating procedures. (7) While purely administrative powers should
be assigned to single department heads, quasi-legislative and quasi-
judicial powers should in some instances be assigned to plural bodies.

Even administrative principles such as those cannot, of course, be
arbitrarily enforced upon a particular governmental structure. Tra-
dition and the hard immediate realities must also be considered if
practical headway is really to be made on behalf of governmental
reform. In that spirit I shall shortly appoint a commission of distin-
guished citizens of this State, including members of both major

56

 

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Executive Records, Governor J. Millard Tawes, 1959-1967
Volume 82, Volume 2, Page 56   View pdf image (33K)
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