County Executive Robert R. Neall officially leaves office tomorrow, handing the mantle of leadership to his friend, John G. Gary.
Mr. Neall's tenure was not an easy one, with a recession, an unprecedented $65 million reduction in state aid and a tax cap that limits the increase in the amount of property tax revenue that the county can collect.
Mr. Neall responded by trimming the work force by 12 percent through an early retirement incentive program and by eliminating 393 positions -- without laying off a single merit-system employee. He reorganized county government, consolidating six departments into three. He privatized several agencies, forming nonprofit organizations to handle economic development, culture and arts, community development and employment services.
His tenure also was marked by stormy labor relations. In 1991, he gave county employees the choice of taking a five-day unpaid furlough or a 3 percent pay cut. Several unions also balked at Mr. Neall's restructuring of the employee health care package.
Last week, Mr. Neall's fourth-floor office in the Arundel Center already was vacated, with workers stripping wallpaper and renovating in preparation for Mr. Gary. In an hourlong interview, Mr. Neall reflected on his four-year term, the county's future and finally answered the often-asked question of what he'll be doing after he leaves office.
This is an edited transcript of that interview.
Q: What's your legacy? What would you see as what you have accomplished.
Mr. Neall: I would say handling some of the lingering, difficult problems facing the county: jail, landfill, school construction, courthouse, reorganization, those sorts of things.
Q: Does anything stand out as paramount?
Mr. Neall: I think it's going to be hard to forget the depths of the recession. I mean, that was really a very scary time. We didn't know how long the recession was going to last or how deep it would go. Revenues were in a free fall.
I was being roundly criticized for being mean and nasty and cruel by trying to lead people through these changes, but in my heart of hearts, I didn't think I was doing enough. . . . So it was really like being chewed on from two different sides, being criticized for being too harsh and in the final analysis wondering whether you'd been harsh enough. I would think most of the people around here would say that year or so was really more engraved in your memory than just everyday stuff. . . . There was a long period of time there when long-term planning was like, a week.
Nobody knew anything. The state used to be as solid as a dollar and was just as predictable as it could be. Now they were up in the air. . . . What I tried to do was keep the problem in front of me. I knew what [cuts] the state was contemplating. I had in my mind an idea of how long it would take them to get to where they were going. And my idea was to try to stay a little bit ahead. I guess the flash point, if you will, was when I decided to get some wage concessions, because in a budget that's 70 percent personnel, that's your largest source of cash, and we had already passed the hat around all the nonpersonnel stuff. And I honestly felt that if we didn't save some money on personnel, that we'd have to issue pink slips before the end of the fiscal year.
And so working through this, I tried to communicate with the work force, saying "I think if everybody gives a little, everybody will survive." I thought that was a more desirable alternative than issuing 400 or 500 pink slips at the end of the year because we couldn't meet cash flow. It wasn't easy, but we got through it.
Q: The sense from the work force at that time was that you still could cut more from nonpersonnel parts of the budget?
Mr. Neall: They were in a major state of denial. . . . But you have to understand that part of that mind-set was, they had just gone through seven or eight years where money was never an issue. It just wasn't. So you went from the very best of times to the worst of times, and it took a long time for people to mentally adjust to that.
And of course, just on the edge of this, the November [1992] election came and we got the tax cap, which meant that even when and if this area recovered economically, the county government wouldn't. So that made it absolutely essential that the stop-gap stuff that I did, we just discarded that and we started to make some permanent changes. So, I mean, that consumed the first 2 1/2 years we were here.
Q: Is there anything that you wanted to do that you haven't been able to accomplish?
Mr. Neall: Lots of things. I wish I could have done something with the fire service and put that to bed. I still say the fire administrator's got to have command and control powers in order to truly be able to have a first-class fire service. . . .
I would have liked to have seen a conference center for the city of Annapolis. . . . I think a lot of people don't realize that as the rest of the country recovers and goes back to prosperity, for the first time, we won't because our economy is stagnant. If you look at the major portions of our economy, the portfolio is changing. And as a result, we're not going to be recession-proof, we're not going to bounce back faster than the rest of the country.
Q: Why is the economy stagnant here?
Mr. Neall: Well, defense, military, government: those are your biggies, and they're shrinking. And not only that, but they're rich jobs. . . . People can buy homes and nice cars and that sort of thing. Take Westinghouse, for instance. Probably in 1987 or 1988 -- this is just guessing off the top of my head -- there may have been 20,000 people, maybe more, working at Westinghouse. And these were all good jobs. Now I think there are less than 8,000. Where did all that purchasing power go? And it's got to have an effect on the region.
If you look at the composition of our job mix, we've got roughly the same number of jobs that we had in 1990. But when you analyze them, there are a lot more in the retail and service sector where they don't pay as much. So if you could do a gross county product in terms of county income, I suspect it hasn't kept up the way it would have if things had stayed the same before the recession. And those are just changes that we're all going to have to get used to.
Q: What kind of a budget situation is John Gary going to face over the next four years? Is it going to be tougher than what you faced?
Mr. Neall: I don't think it's going to be tougher, because I don't think he'll ever have to put together a budget that was less than the year before. His problem is going to be to keep the ball in the middle of the fairway. And what it means is you're going to have incremental budget, where the budget will go up 3 1/2 , 4, 4 1/2 percent each year. You'll be able to give a small pay raise every other year, something like that. You can grow some at the margin if you want to, add 10 cops a year, or a few firefighters or paramedics, enough teachers to keep up with the student growth. But not too much beyond that.
It's like the fat person that's lost 100 pounds. Losing 100 pounds was real hard, but keeping it off is just as hard, because it requires day-to-day discipline. And so, it's going to be difficult to apply that discipline, but I don't think it's going to be as difficult as having to re-do your budget two times a year and have a bunch of other little catastrophes happen all at once.
Q: Do you wish that your relationship with your employees and the labor unions could have been a little smoother?
Mr. Neall: Oh sure, you can always wish that. They didn't want to change, and we had to change. And the charter doesn't say anything about the employees loving the county executive. I'm sure everybody likes to be liked, but I had a larger responsibility than just to the employees. I think in retrospect, when you look at everything that took place over the last four years, I think I was a lot better steward for the employees' well-being than I will ever be given credit for. But you'll never be able to convince them of that.
I tried to balance the decisions that I had to make. I didn't disregard the welfare of the employees. But the organization had to survive. Anne Arundel County couldn't file Chapter 11 [bankruptcy] and seek protection from its creditors. We have a constitutional mission to perform. So that had to come first.
Could we have done it better?. Yes, I guess we could have. The only thing I can tell you is, you sort of had to be there.
Q: If you knew it was going to be like this, do you think you would have taken the job?
Mr. Neall: I wouldn't have missed this opportunity for anything, because I think I proved a couple of things.
[He refers to the opinion of many that he would have won or faced minor opposition if he'd run for re-election]
I think that, in and of itself, is very significant. You can make difficult decisions, you can do the right thing, you can say "no" as a politician and still have at least the potential of being re-elected. Nobody gets a guarantee. But I think there's a lesson there, that you can be forthright, that you can do what you think is right in a very difficult political environment.
Q: I know in deciding not to run for governor and deciding not to run for county executive, part of it was an economic decision. But is there a sense that you just got a little bit tired of the fight?
Mr. Neall: Oh yes. And the other thing was, I wanted this four-year term. You only get four years at a time. . . . The one thing I wouldn't do is I wouldn't let go here. And I think to some extent you have to let go [to run a statewide campaign]. . . . There was a lot of unfinished work here that I wanted to finish in this last year and a half. That was part of it. But ultimately, what it boils down to, as my dad once told me, is you should never bet money that you can't afford to lose.
Ages 46 to 50, in most people's lives, is sort of prime time. I made a hell of a lot more money than I'm making now in private industry four years back. . . . Sure, if I were sitting on a nest egg and if I could look my four kids in the face and know that their future was assured and everything else, if I was sitting on a trust fund, they would have to drag me out of public service with wild horses. . . . It was really a combination of things. It was bad timing more than anything else. And I made the right decision. Absolutely, without question, I made the right decision.
Q: Do you know what you're going to be doing after Monday?
Mr. Neall: I'm probably going to go into business for myself, doing some managerial consulting, financial stuff. I've had a number of people approach me . . . who are interested in my looking at their organization and helping them.
Q: Would you be available to other county governments as well?
Mr. Neall: Sure. I've got to obey the ethics laws and everything else, but I can't imagine a situation under which I couldn't do some work for a local or municipal government. I don't have anything in mind off the top of my head. But . . . I've got more experience there than I do in anything else. But I think most of it's going to be in the health care field. Hospitals as a group, if they're going to survive, are going to have to drastically cut costs.