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Dogmas of Administrative Reform: As Exemplified in the Recent Reorganization in Ohio

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

F. W. Coker
F. W. Coker
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

An extensive reorganization of administrative offices in Ohio was accomplished by a law enacted in April, 1921, and in effect July 1st, 1921. That reorganization is taken as the central point of this discussion, not because persons outside of Ohio are interested in details of Ohio government, but because the Ohio reorganization is one of the latest of such schemes to be put into effect and because it has been considered to exemplify relatively well the principles which our leading administrative reformers wish to see applied in our state executive departments. There is nothing of more practical importance in this connection than to examine carefully the principles upon which these reorganizations are supposed to be based. The editor of the National Municipal Review pronounces the Ohio reorganization to be “a big advance in popular government;” and Dr. W. F. Dodd, one of our leading experts in state government, says that the Ohio reorganization “is perhaps the most effective yet planned in this country, except for the fact of the constitutional limitation of the governor's term” to two years. This paper will sketch, as briefly as possible, and at certain points roughly judge, the changes made by the Ohio reorganization act of 1921, and then try briefly to indicate my general attitude towards the objects and policies of such a reorganization.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , August 1922 , pp. 399 - 411
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1922

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References

1 The act is entitled “An act to establish an administrative code for the State, to create new administrative departments and redistribute among them existing administrative functions‥…” (109 Laws of Ohio, 105–135). There is not space here to review the extensive surveys and recommendations made by experts preliminary to the reorganization, or to discuss the action of the legislature in declaring the reorganization act to be “an emergency law necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety” (by this action protecting the act from the test of a popular referendum) or the decision of the Ohio supreme court sustaining the action of the legislature.

2 These eight new departments are as follows: finance, commerce, highways and public works, agriculture, industrial relations, education, public welfare, health. The act provides that the superintendent of public instruction shall be director of education; the former is a constitutional officer appointed by the governor for a four year term.

3 The thirteen departments made partly dependent, and left partly independent, by the reorganization, are the following: six examining and licensing boards (medical, dental, pharmacy, optometry, embalming, accounting), left independent in tenure but “attached to the department of education;” three administrative commissions exercising supplementary legislative and quasi-judicial functions (the industrial, public utility, and tax commissions, attached, respectively, to the departments of industrial relations, commerce, and finance); the commission for the blind, independently appointed but attached to the department of public welfare; the state library board, placed in the department of education,” but with a majority of its members independent of the director of education; the commissioner of soldiers' claims, placed “under the supervision of the adjutant general,” but not appointed or removable by him; the public health council.

4 The fourteen departments left wholly or almost wholly unaffected by the reorganization are the following: the civil service commission; the adjutant general; the boards of trustees of the six universities and normal schools, of the archaeological and historical museum, and of the soldiers' and sailors' orphans' home; the board of directors of the Longview hospital; the veterinary examiners; the commissioner of prohibition (created by act of February 9, 1921); the superintendent of banks. The last-mentioned office is said by the act to be in the department of commerce,” but the immediately subsequent provisions of the act (added by amendment in the course of the passage of the bill through the legislature) give the office a position of apparently complete independence, in tenure and function, of the department of commerce.

5 The five offices brought together in the department of commerce are the following: superintendent of insurance, inspector of building and loan associations, commissioner of securities, inspector of oils, state fire marshal.

6 In addition the act gives the director of finance new functions in connection with checking up on the incurring of liabilities by administrative officials, and prescribing forms for accounts, orders, invoices, and financial reports. These functions constitute a probably useful addition to the state auditor's work of auditing incurred liabilities.

7 Prior to the act the agricultural activities of the state (except those of the experiment station and of the college of agriculture of the state university) were administered under the control of an unpaid board of agriculture acting through a secretary appointed by the board.

8 The offices of state highway commissioner, superintendent of public works, and state building commission (an ex officio body) are abolished by the act and their duties conferred upon the director of highways and public works. The act also transfers to this director the duties formerly fulfilled by the adjutant general in his capacity of superintendent of public buildings. Another act passed in the same session abolishes the state highway advisory board.

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