Plain speaking

The press release that came out of Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton’s office January 2001 included all the calm government-speak of an official making a small programmatic adjustment. On workers’ comp for coal miners, the governor was still behind his state’s 1996 reforms. The reforms had saved money and had made the compensation system more objective, he said, but admitted some modification was needed to ensure miners with black lung were properly compensated.

To an outsider, the comments may have sounded like the wheels of government grinding along as usual. To people who had followed the contentious ’96 reforms and watched the number of black-lung claims paid fall from hundreds a year to virtually none, the admission was remarkable. More so, because Gov. Patton had made a fortune in the coal business and earlier had declared the black lung claim system “totally out of control.”

To his eternal credit, he did not dodge the mistake he made; he didn’t leave it for the next governor to work on or claim that he could not change a system that was saving so much money. (The black-lung compensation fund since the reform had grown a $17 million surplus.) Instead, he looked over the results of his work and announced as he prepared for a second try this year at fixing his reforms, “I don’t know how to say it any more plain – I was wrong. I have wronged the coal miners in Kentucky. I want the opportunity to correct that wrong.”

Gov. Patton, a Democrat, has a fight ahead with Republican lawmakers who delayed his bill last year and may not favor his suggestions now for further reform. But he has been strongly supported by numerous national news stories about his proposals. It isn’t that editors who wouldn’t know a coal mine if they fell into one suddenly got interested in the health effects of mining. It is that they are surprised, and believe their readers will be surprised, by a governor who admits he was wrong about something important and then tries to make it right.

Let’s hope Gov. Patton succeeds in improving the lives of coal miners and in serving as an example to other leaders who may be busy avoiding policy mistakes that live on in their states.