Authors: Michael Kranish,Scott Helman
Willing to look beyond the Republican Party for top talent, Romney turned to high-powered figures such as Robert C. Pozen, a former top executive at Fidelity Investments; and Douglas I. Foy, the longtime president of the nonprofit Conservation Law Foundation. Over twenty-five years, Foy had been a relentless force at the law foundation, which had won numerous landmark lawsuits to protect the quality of air, water, and open space in New England, including litigation preventing a second reactor at the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear plant and oil drilling in the Georges Bank fishing grounds. Pozen had been vice chairman of Fidelity Investments, practiced and taught law, and been associate general counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission. They were the biggest names in a strong lineup, and Romney gave both broad authority over new “supersecretariats” that oversaw economic development, housing, the environment, and more. This had long been a Romney credo: surround yourself with smart, aggressive players and let them go to work.
Once Romney had his team in place, he managed the way he knew how: he wanted piles of data and robust, free-flowing debate. One of Pozen’s major tasks was to rescue the state’s nearly insolvent unemployment insurance fund, which was draining quickly because of the state’s generous benefits during a time of high joblessness. He focused on a plan that would reward firms with stable employment and require greater contributions from employers that often cut their workforce. “We probably presented him with ten or twenty different [computer] runs,” he recalled of his dealings with Romney. “He would go through them and really absorb the data and try to figure it out.”
Foy came from an environmental background, Romney from a business one. But they found common ground in wanting to minimize sprawl, using the state’s leverage to promote density in development, and maximize open space. As a candidate, Romney had called sprawl “the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts.” Romney threw himself behind the notion of “smart growth,” as it was known, rewarding communities that clustered new residential and commercial projects, particularly around mass transit hubs. This view of economic development also manifested itself in what became known as a “fix-it-first” transportation policy, in which Romney’s administration would focus on repairing existing roads and bridges instead of building new highway systems at the request of local politicians.
On these issues or any other, Romney wanted to know every argument for and against a certain course of action—he was “a decision maker by devil’s advocacy,” said Eric A. Kriss, with whom Romney had worked at Bain for years before tapping him to be state budget chief. “He would take conflicting facts and different perspectives and put them all on the table and have everyone argue all sides. There were times when I knew privately the outcome he favored, but he would actually take the opposite view of his own opinion, so that he could not only try it on for size but also know what the pushback would be.”
F
rom the moment they got into office, Romney and his team faced an urgent task. The budget was in meltdown. The state faced a potential $650 million deficit. Worse, his analysts discovered that the projected shortfall for the following year was exploding—from $2 billion to $3 billion in a $23 billion budget. Romney and the legislature settled on an austere plan to close nearly all the projected gap. His leadership in steering the state through the fiscal maelstrom is unquestionably one of his key achievements. In the retelling, however, he and his aides have often overstated the accomplishment. The budget gap never became as wide as Romney said, because tax collections came in more than $1.2 billion above preliminary estimates. He also understated the side effects of the rescue plan: big fee increases, more tax dollars wrested out of business, and increased pressure on local property taxes.
The plan raised at least $331 million in new revenue through increased fees for permits, licenses, and services—about a 45 percent jump. Massachusetts residents suddenly found it more expensive to get a driver’s license, marry, or buy a home. In addition, it raised $128 million from tax code tweakings to close what Romney called loopholes for businesses. Some eliminated schemes by corporations to avoid state taxes by sheltering income in shell companies. Many business leaders considered the changes tax increases, even if Romney didn’t call them that. Another $181 million in so-called loophole closings followed in the next two years.
The effects of the deep spending cuts were also felt in cities and towns, which absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of reductions in state assistance over the first eighteen months of Romney’s term. When Romney left office, Massachusetts communities—in a twenty-five-year high—relied on property taxes to cover 53 percent of their budgets, up from 49 percent before Romney took office. Many communities cut services and raised fees on residents as a result. Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s longtime spokesman, said that local officials had exaggerated the impact of the cuts, which had been made necessary by a plunge in state tax revenues. “Cities and towns share in the state’s revenues when times are good, but they also must share in the belt-tightening when times are bad,” he said. The budget cuts were often deep and painful, but Barbara Anderson, the antitax activist who had begged Romney to run for governor, identified a trade-off. “What people don’t credit him for,” she said, “is what he prevented from happening . . . a [broad-based] tax increase.”
From the outset, Romney’s team maintained tight control of information and displayed a disciplined, centralized management style. The administration spoke with one voice, usually Romney’s. Assisted by Boston-based management consultants, they scoured the bureaucracy, culling data in a search for inefficiency, waste, and savings. That work provided the basis for what Romney would tout as “the most significant restructuring of state government in half a century.” Sensing a mandate, the new governor pursued bold goals. He aimed to overhaul the sprawling human services system, a court network beset by legislative meddling and patronage, and the twenty-nine-campus public higher education system. At the same time, he wanted to loosen the teachers unions’ influence on public education and fix a troubled state program that helped cities and towns finance school building and repair projects. Some changes Romney could make himself, by executive order. His cuts to the state bureaucracy, however, turned out to be fairly modest. After four years, he reduced the payroll of agencies under his direct control by 603 jobs, according to his administration’s tally. By contrast, a Republican predecessor, William F. Weld, had closed state hospitals, privatized services, and slashed about 7,700 jobs during his first term, though the numbers had later increased when the economy improved.
Many other moves to reform state government required legislative support, and there Romney often faltered. That was partly because he showed little interest in the lawmakers themselves. He and his brainy, idealistic staff seemed too often blind to the fact that sweeping reforms, even if they made great sense in a white paper, counted for nothing unless the spadework had been done to cultivate legislative support. Romney, never a backslapper, invested little in building such ties—or even in getting to know the players. And so his court consolidation plan went nowhere, his vision for higher education vanished almost without a trace. Only pieces of his grand plan became law. A frequent complaint was that Romney, unlike previous Republican governors, rarely made an effort to develop meaningful relationships with the rank and file. Weld, for example, had once traded his support for a legislative pay raise in return for a promise by legislative leaders to cut the capital gains tax. “Weld had a genuine curiosity about the people in the building and what made them tick, and how to develop functional relationships that proved to be productive in the clinch,” said Thomas Finneran, a Democrat who was House speaker for the first twenty-one months of Romney’s term. “Romney was considerably more reserved.”
A fellow Democratic lawmaker put it more pointedly: “You remember Richard Nixon and the imperial presidency? Well, this was the imperial governor.” There were the ropes that often curtailed access to Romney and his chambers. The elevator settings that restricted access to his office. The tape on the floor that told people exactly where to stand during events. This was the controlled environment that Romney created. His orbit was his own. “We always would talk about how, among the legislators, he had no idea what our names were—none,” the lawmaker said. “Because he was so far removed from the day-to-day operations of state government.”
E
ven as some of his sweeping initiatives ran headlong into political reality, Romney remained certain about his path. And there was nothing he was surer of than his vision for economic growth. “My program for creating jobs is second to none in the entire history of this state,” he said during the gubernatorial campaign. But he inherited a brittle economy; few states had been hit harder by the collapse of the tech bubble than Massachusetts. The state lost about 200,000 jobs, or nearly 6 percent of its workforce, between February 2001 and December 2003, the end of his first year in office. Then the climate began to gradually improve. Through it all, Romney was heavily involved in trying to sell business leaders on Massachusetts. A spokesman said he met each year with an average of about fifty chief executive officers who were considering expanding or locating in the state. Still, by the end of Romney’s term, fewer than 40,000 net new jobs had been generated statewide, about a 1 percent increase. It was the fourth weakest rate of job growth of all states over the same period—a testament, ultimately, to the gap between what elected leaders say they will do about job growth and what they can actually do.
Nonetheless, Romney gets credit in some quarters for improving the state’s competitiveness. His administration streamlined the public approval process to help businesses expand and revived an agency charged with recruiting businesses to Massachusetts. Under Ranch C. Kimball, a self-described “Romney Democrat” who succeeded Robert Pozen as secretary of economic development in 2004, the number of companies in the Massachusetts development pipeline jumped from 13 to 288 in three years, though much of that was driven by the recovering economy and the rise of the biotechnology and life sciences sector. In 2006, Bristol-Myers Squibb chose an eighty-nine-acre site northwest of Boston over one in North Carolina for a $750 million complex, which, as of the summer of 2011, employed more than three hundred people. The deal required tax credits, other state assistance, and an unusual show of teamwork by two reluctant playmates, Romney and the legislature.
Through it all, Romney remained something of a reluctant political negotiator. Instead of pushing his agenda through closed-door appeals to legislators, he favored well-orchestrated media events to generate public pressure. They were often heavy on stagecraft and carefully choreographed by his aides. “His theory of government was ‘I’m going to the bully pulpit, which is the press, and beat you up so you succumb to my position,’ ” said Salvatore DiMasi, a Democrat who served as House speaker during most of Romney’s term. (DiMasi would later become a symbol of the kind of deal making Romney sought to avoid; he was sentenced to an eight-year prison term after a corruption conviction in 2011.)
Romney’s gifts as a communicator produced some triumphs. One was a bill on repeat drunken drivers that he and his lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, prodded lawmakers to toughen in 2005 by enlisting family members of victims to make emotional televised appeals. Another came when Romney refused to sign a retroactive increase in the state’s capital gains tax approved by the legislature in 2005 that would have affected 48,000 taxpayers. Romney’s objections lit up the radio talk shows, and lawmakers backed down. He possessed, too, an instinct for the grand gesture, as he demonstrated after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Romney was unusually critical of the country’s fumbled response under President Bush, calling it “an embarrassment,” and he offered to take in thousands of evacuees on Cape Cod, where he set up an entire makeshift town on a military base. In the end, only 235 people were sent to Massachusetts. But Romney committed the state to helping anyone it could. “They’re going to find it warm here, and hospitable,” he said, “and they’re going to find the people of Massachusetts have great big hearts.”
One of his longest-running battles with the legislature was over the Big Dig, the beleaguered Boston highway project that became a symbol of patronage and mismanagement. Romney had twice sought control of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, the quasi-independent agency that oversaw the project, but had been rebuffed by the legislature, where the authority’s chairman, former Republican state senator Matthew J. Amorello, had important friends. Then a tragedy changed everything. On the night of July 10, 2006, heavy concrete ceiling panels fell onto a car driving through a Big Dig tunnel. Milena Del Valle, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three from Boston, was killed.
Within hours, Amorello was at the scene, where he remained as morning broke, briefing investigators, reviewing the accident with the state attorney general, and coordinating with state police. Romney aides had called Amorello’s office, saying the governor wanted to see him. But before Amorello could make his way to the statehouse, Romney lost his patience, incensed that Amorello hadn’t shown up yet. So Romney, his blood boiling, went to Amorello. He arrived at the scene and darted toward Amorello with an outstretched hand. In the bizarre seconds that followed, Romney, visibly agitated, gave Amorello a handshake, grabbed his shoulder with one hand, and then slapped him on the chest with the other. “You’re too big for the governor?” Romney said, according to one witness to the exchange. “You’re too big for the governor?”