ustxtxb_obs_1968_10_04_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

viding more money for the colleges, especially for faculty salaries, and while he angered Texas public school teachers at one point by resisting the extent of their salary demands, they have done pretty well during his period. But Texas still ranks middling or low among the states in the educational categories. Education in Texas, UT regents’ chairman Frank Erwin said recently, is still “undernourished and pale.” Junior college enrollment has greatly expanded and there has been a three-fold increase in technical and vocational course offerings in response to Connally’s emphasis on providing industry with more skilled workers. The governor can also point to three new state schools for the mentally retarded \(at Richmond, Corpus Christi and children in West Texas, and a new concept of community-o r i e n t e d mental health care. But the state’s eelymosynary institutions and special schools are still overcrowded. “We have upgraded all the facilities of the Texas Youth Council,” the governor says. “We have upgraded nearly all facilities under mental retardation and mental health.” N AN OVERVIEW, Connally has driven the state’s budgets upward. “You’ve been a spender,” the interviewer remarked. “Yeah,” he replied, “actually I really have. Tremendous, when you look. at the budgets.” The rivers and city air are being polluted here as elsewhere. On one of the worst days of Connally’s regime, Houston’s chief anti-pollution official accused him of appointing one of Houston’s most chronic pollution offenders to the state pollution control board. Connally alludes, however, to a $10,000 fine recently levied in Houston against an accused industrial polluter. He thinks the state’s Water Quality Board has made “some headway,” and he has extracted from the legislature a small sum for a start in regionwide planning. “Sure, it’s a beginning, but to say we’ve solved the problem is ridiculous, because we haven’t,” he says. The state’s water problems, he believes, can be solved only with area planning “on a river basin concept,” so the state will have to be given “the authority over these basins,” but this, of course, runs into the autonomous river authorities. “Galveston Bay starts with Dallas-Fort Worth,” he says. “It’s gonna be tough, but it’s gotta happen.” He mentions quick-fire his state fine arts commission, his committee to promote libraries, “the ten tourist trails,” more highway patrolmen, his new higher education coordinating board. As for the consumer credit code, he said it’s true that you can “pick holes” in it and show it allows a rate of interest of 300% on improbably-hypothecated loans, but that the choice was whether to “drive them outside the law or permit a high rate of interest,” and the decision was 6 The Texas Observer made to take the latter course. Nobody can know the frustrations he has had, he says, but still he has given the state “a thrust of progress on many different fronts. . . . That’s what I’ve tried to dojust give a lot of things a shove.” A one-cent city sales tax was authorized at his behest, and this year the legislature added, without much objection from him, yet another penny to the state sales tax. Texas has no income tax, corporate or personal. Connally favors, next, a rebate of some of the federal income tax to the states. He advocated the city sales tax, Connally said, because “I didn’t want to see the state sales tax increased again.” He speaks of a “better collection system,” and he adds, “there are other sources of income that we can tap. . . . I’ve been opposed to the imposition of a sales tax on drugs and food. I don’t think they oughta pass it.” Adding quickly, Connally demonstrates that the state will have to have between $350 and $400 million in new revenue in the 1969-70 biennium. Welfare, $30 mllion; teachers, $270 million; colleges, $76 millionthese are automatic increases, he says. He would favor the federal income tax rebate, he says, “basically on the theory that many of the programs that the federal government has proposed, they are now backing out of.” Would this rebate have the same effect as a state income tax? he was asked. “Yes, very definitely it does,” he replied. C ONNALLY STILL speaks of a two-party state as though it. would usher in a Dark Age. He argues that “you get enough diversity in a one-party state,” along with continuity of service and a minimum of turnover and patronage in the state government. “When I came in, who did I fire?” he asks. Reminded that he abolished some boards and thus got to appoint members of the successor boards, he said “Yes, but’that’s about all the patronage I have.” Critics of the system have said it produces not only one-party, but also oneman control. The state Democratic party is very much a creature of the governor’s wishes. Connally upholds, as perfectly proper, his state parks and wildlife commissioners’ collection of a private $200,000 fund to pay for a state park to buffer President Johnson’s ranch from commercialism. “This is not my list. This is not my board,” he says with some heat. “The money was raised from ‘private sources among private individuals, and I have no control over it. I’ve never seen the list. I prefer that they [the names] be released.” This year a determined attempt to raise the state natural gas tax failed in the senate by a 16-to-15 vote, and this year also Connally accepted a gift of an airplane to the state from George Brown’s multimillion-dollar Texas Eastern Transmission Co., a natural gas pipeline. Con nally, who uses the plane, defends the gift as all to the good for the state. “They gave that airplane to the state,” he says. “They said, ‘We have no further use for it, can you all use it?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be glad to use it.’ It’s a good airplane, in good condition.” Connally added he is glad when anybody gives the state “land for parks or anything else that’s of intrinsic value to the state,” paintings, for instance, or endowed lectureships. Looking around his office, Connally added, “I’d love for people to give furniture.” Connally’s first year as governor, a little rider appeared in the appropriation ‘s bill prohibiting the use of any state money for architectural fees without the advance written approval of the governor. Connally said he did not ask for this. power, but he intended to exercise it, and so he has. For instance, the University of Texas board of regents agreed that the firm of Nesmith-Lane and Associates of El Paso would be paid $90,000 as associate architect for a college building in El Paso. Rea Nesmith was a former Republican state committeeman and an active Republican. The regents, denied Connally’s approval of Nesmith’s firm, had to reverse their award. One of them resigned, making public a letter he had received from Connally’s close associate, Frank Erwin, \(also, by the by, a regent, Erwin said that Connally considered architectural contracts “valuable gifts” that should not, other things equal, be awarded “to architects who have not been friendly to him and his administration.” Connally denied he thought any such thing, but Nesmith didn’t get his contract. “This is government by crony,” Nessmith charged. “John Connally is doing for Texas what LBJ does for the nation using government money as awards for political friends, denying it to opposition.” Nesmith ran into Connally as a reception in El Paso and gave this account of their meeting: “I introduced myself, saying: ‘Any man who has done to me what you have done at least ought to know me in person when you see me.’ .Co which he replied: ‘Texas is a one-party state and I’ll see to it that it stays that way. . . ” I N FOREIGN policy Connally is an eagle in Latin-America and a hawk in Asia. He supported Johnson’s dispatch of troops to the Dominican Republic and aggressively upholds the president’s conduct of the Vietnam war. In March, 1965, Connally delivered a “John Kennedy Memorial Lecture” at a Catholic Student Center in Austin on the Alliance for Progress. In the questionand-answer he was asked about the United States cutting off aid to military dictatorships. “I think I can answer your question by saying I’m sorry we traded Batista for Castro,” Connally answered.