Innovations: Musical Chairs in Maryland

By Bonnie Angelo

Even before she had a chance to take over the Maryland Governor's chair last month, Shaila Aery confronted her first crisis: two guards held hostage in a state prison uprising. Aery remembers thinking, "Where can I hide?" Fortunately the real Governor, William Donald Schaefer, alerted to the emergency, was already at his desk. But for Aery, normally secretary of higher education, it was a dramatic introduction to a unique job-swapping scheme in which the Governor ordered state Cabinet officials to exchange portfolios every morning for a month, then write reports and suggestions based on their experiences.

Schaefer, who moved temporarily to the department of human resources, is proud of his shake-up. Taking over a Cabinet colleague's desk, he believes, brings in fresh eyes and can inject new ideas into stale bureaucracy. He devised the plan while he was mayor of Baltimore from 1971 to 1987 because the city's departments "did not know they were interdependent." When he first proposed the idea to city officials, he recalls, "they thought it was silly. But the second time we got good results."

State officials were no less skeptical the first time Schaefer scrambled the chairs of 31 Cabinet members three years ago. Even this year, there was some foot dragging. "I bitched my head off, but it was an eye opener for everybody," says director of public relations Lainy LeBow, who also went to the human resources department. "I'll be the first to sign up next time." Some of the officials grumbled over the added hours, but most of their anxiety was about outsiders' big-footing on their territory. Everybody in Annapolis remembers the last swap, in 1988, when housing secretary Jacqueline Rogers was sent over to the planning department and promptly recommended that it be dissolved. Within a year it was gone, folded into the budget office. This year, when Rogers showed up for a stint as the head of the budget office, officials there rolled out the red carpet and solicited her advice on devising a new format for budget documents.

Marylanders have learned to expect the unexpected from Schaefer, a Democrat who is serving his second four-year term. A 69-year-old bachelor with a hot temper and a flair for the flamboyant, he made headlines in February by granting clemency to eight women convicted of murdering men who had abused them. In the notoriously corrupt politics of Maryland, he remains squeaky clean, an unpolished zircon who spends as many nights in the working-class row house he has lived in all his life as he does in the 53-room official mansion that was redecorated by his close friend of 35 years, Hilda Mae Snoops.

Despite a long career in local and state government, Schaefer has never developed a tolerance for red tape. During his temporary stewardship at the department of human resources last month, he encountered the kind of bureaucratic bottleneck that irks him. An office had run out of food-stamp forms. "I asked why," says the Governor, "especially since the forms came from an office not 20 feet away." A clerk told him they were "supposed to come through the system," at which Schaefer snapped, "Why don't you just walk over and get them?" She did. On a more sympathetic note, Schaefer showed his concern for congenial working conditions at the department by rearranging furniture in an office that he found "dull and unattractive," and by suggesting that its occupant bring a lamp from home to brighten up the place. Marvels Schaefer: "They took all my suggestions."

Not surprising. But the Governor, for his part, is also giving serious consideration to the proposals his colleagues are submitting to him. At least one acting agency head, dismayed by what he found, will recommend "sweeping changes" in the offices he visited. Another department head, Martin Walsh of general services, came away from a month in juvenile services -- "an area that was a real void for me" -- eager to help that overburdened agency compete for what he calls "the scarce bucks."

The most politically sensitive report will come from Daryl Plevy, the Governor's director of legal and labor issues, who spent her month at the department of health and mental hygiene. Plevy, appalled by the extreme understaffing she encountered in the maximum-security ward of a hospital for the criminally insane, has already taken action to cut red tape on personnel matters. But her report will raise other prickly questions. "Resources are limited," she says. "Should we pay for AZT when you know it will only make that one better for a while, or should we use that money for prevention? Should Medicaid pay to keep comatose patients alive indefinitely? This gets you into really tough choices."

Schaefer rates his latest swap at the top a clear success, with high marks for the first sit-in Governor, Shaila Aery. He concurred with her advice to stay away from the prison during last month's hostage crisis. The strategy worked: after 23 hours the guards were quietly freed.