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FeedHas Anyone Seen our Governor Lately?
After a first term marked by several big legislative successes, Ruth Ann Minner had to manage a couple major scandals that, many say, have forced a mental retirement. Has she really checked out? Will the work left to do get done?
As she prepares to bow out of active politics, Governor Ruth Ann Minner can look back on a career in which she has been a figure of both inspiration and consternation. She has been described as tough and insensitive. Loyal—to a fault. Down to earth, yet inaccessible. A hard worker—and a micromanager. Bold, as well as too cautious.
But there is one point observers from both ends of the political spectrum agree on: The only female governor in the history of Delaware has proved more adept at good ol’ boy politics than any of her male predecessors.
The lifelong Democrat achieved this bit of gender-bending irony by learning at the grass roots level how things are done in Dover.
Most of us are familiar with her story. Born at Slaughter Neck, Ruth Ann Coverdale left school at 16 to help support her family. She later married Frank Ingram, with whom she had three sons. Ingram died of a heart attack when she was 32. The next year, 1968, she earned her general equivalency degree, then attended Delaware Technical and Community College while working two jobs to support the family. In 1969 she married Roger Minner. The two operated a family towing business, until he died of cancer in 1991.
Minner’s political career began with a clerkship in the Delaware House of Representatives and as receptionist in the office of Democratic Governor Sherman W. Tribbitt (1972-76). Those jobs gave her grounding in the legislative process. In 1974 she was elected to the State House of Representatives. That post launched her 35 years in elective office—35 years in which she never lost an election.
Throughout that time, Minner’s knowledge of the system and her influence have enabled her to do things she believed worth doing, all while deflecting or virtually ignoring critics, who have increased markedly during her second term. Vilified by some, nearly deified by others, she has forged a legacy as governor that began with some bold and decisive initiatives in her first term and stubborn denials of ongoing problems in her second. One wonders what’s left to accomplish—or what will be accomplished—during her last few months in office.
Governor Minner signs the Clean Indoor
Air Act, which prohibits smoking in most
indoor public places. Minner will likely be
remembered for the controversial law, which
went into effect November 27, 2002.
A Record of Unique Successes
Often described as a middle-of-the-road politician—fiscally conservative, socially progressive—Minner has concentrated on the environment, education and health care. Even her critics agree that the smoking ban—the Clean Indoor Air Act implemented in November 2002—will remain top of mind with most Delawareans.
“Among those who follow politics closely, the criticism is that she doesn’t stick out her neck,” says Alan Loudell, news anchor at Wilmington talk station WDEL. “With the smoking ban, she did. She was not generally a crusader, but she will be remembered for that bill. And, really, how many Delaware governors—or governors of any state for that matter—are remembered for a specific piece of legislation?”
The governor’s website claims the Clean Air Act has reduced cancerous pollutants in Delaware’s restaurants, bars and casinos by more than 90 percent. Indeed, the woman who lost a husband to the disease seemed to target it. Another early success: a first-in-the-nation program that pays for treatment for those who can’t afford it.
Minner also got kudos for fiscal leadership. She entered office in 2001 amid one of the worst national recessions since World War II. While other states were cutting services and increasing taxes, the new governor pared hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state budget without drastic effects on services. Her leadership helped make Delaware one of only a few states to weather the recession in sound shape.
Minner visits Postlethwait Middle School in Dover to
talk about the Student Excellence Equals Degree (SEED)
scholarship program.
Having earned her education with plenty of sweat, learning is high on Minner’s list of values, so in 2005 she signed innovative legislation that essentially grants two free years of college to students who work hard and stay out of trouble. The Student Excellence Equals Degree scholarship program (SEED) provides tuition for full-time students enrolled in an associate’s degree program at Delaware Tech or the associate of arts program at the University of Delaware.
The governor, who in her 2005 inaugural address described herself as a “farmer, gardener and daughter of a sharecropper,” also has worked to preserve open space. As part of her Livable Delaware initiative, Minner has joined with state and local agencies to develop comprehensive land and infrastructure planning in all three counties and has created a permanent source of money to preserve farmland and a program to preserve forests. Since her first year in office, the state has preserved almost 82,000 acres of open space—though such efforts have put her at odds with many land developers.
“We’ve tried to make laws and rules that allow them to do their work,” Minner says. “We had set some land aside where we think development should happen, and then there’s outlying areas in the middle of farmland where development shouldn’t happen. Some are saying, ‘Well, we want to build where we want to build, and that’s it.’ Well, then we won’t have any farmland left. We have to make room for everybody, and I’ve tried to explain to developers that we don’t want them to stop development, we just want it in a more orderly fashion so we can keep Delaware the way it is, with a mixture of everything—townhouses, single homes, shops, walking spaces, running spaces, play areas for children. It’s the way all of us would like to live—to have room around us so we can enjoy nature, have a chance to see our children play and all the rest of it. The diversity of our state is what makes it so special.”
Minner heads the Homeland Security Committee of the National Governors Association. Samuel Hoff, George Washington Distinguished Professor and chair of the department of history, political science, and philosophy at Delaware State University, gives her points in that area as well. “Every state has to be weighed by its post 9-11 response,” he says, “and Delaware’s has been pretty good.”
Minner helped secure federal funds to bolster the Delaware Emergency Management Agency and establish the Delaware Information and Analysis Center, a multijurisdictional, multiagency system for collecting information and coordinating efforts to prevent or defeat criminal or terrorist activities.
While observers such as Loudell note that her legislative approach has been cautious, the governor has won plaudits from civil libertarians for supporting measures to ensure fair and equal treatment of all individuals regardless of sexual orientation. She also continues to oppose casinos and sports betting, saying “the state should not become any more reliant on this form of revenue.”
Minner is joined by lawmakers and veterans at
Legislative Hall as she signs the contract to build
Troubled Times
As the 2004 general election approached, Minner’s strong fiscal leadership and passage of the Clean Air Act seemed to make her a shoo-in for a second term. Then, on July 12 of that year, a prisoner at Delaware Correctional Center kidnapped and raped a female counselor. The prisoner was eventually shot to death. Five days later, in an article in the Delaware State News, Minner was quoted as saying, “There are problems at every prison. This isn’t something that is unique to Delaware. In prisons, you almost expect this to happen.”
A firestorm ensued. Suddenly the race between the governor and her Republican opponent, retired Judge William Swain Lee, no longer seemed so easy. As Lee made hay of the quote, the Minner campaign went into spin mode, at first with ads denying she made the remark. Then Minner spokesman Gregory B. Patterson (later to become her campaign manager), maintained she was saying prisons hold dangerous inmates and violent incidents sometimes occur. The governor next claimed statements in the newspaper had been “taken out of context.”
“Sure, you regret those kind of things. and the paper plays it up. There’s no question about that,” Minner says now. “I said at the time, and I say it now: That is not what I said. That was a group of sentences I said that one sentence was taken out of context. It had nothing to do with the incident we were talking about. I felt very sorry for the young lady, and I told them to do everything they could the first day the incident happened. Everybody in the prison system just felt awful about what happened. They would’ve done everything they could have to keep it from happening. And after she started talking about suing the state, the attorneys told me, under the circumstances, I couldn’t talk about it. And I didn’t.”
Minner won re-election, but by a smaller margin than in her first race—and by a much smaller margin than her running mate, Lieutenant Governor John Carney.
Then, last summer The News Journal began reporting about sexual assaults and patient abuse at the Delaware Psychiatric Center. The governor and her staff, dealing with a lawsuit from the prison rape, were slow to respond. The state’s leading radio talkers and major newspapers criticized Minner mainly for her lack of response to the prison and DPC crises. It reached peak intensity when Minner said, “We have nothing to base any kind of investigation on except a newspaper article.” Nearly six weeks after The News Journal’s first DPC story, she finally appointed a task force to investigate the state hospital.
State Senator Karen Peterson, a Democrat, but admittedly no Minner fan, says The News Journal, and to a lesser extent WDEL, became distractions to the administration.
“I can remember in meetings on the prison system, all they wanted to talk about was ‘that no-good News Journal,’” Peterson says. “It was a circling-the-wagon mentality, and, in the five years I’ve been [in the Senate], I’ve seen a lot of that. Rather than step up to the plate and say, ‘Hey, maybe there is a problem, maybe we need to take a look at this and fix it,’ they shoot the messenger. And they use all their ammunition on the messenger instead of on the problem.”
“That was an abomination, the way she handled the prison issue,” says John Flaherty, former lobbyist for Common Cause of Delaware. “Likewise, the Delaware Psychiatric Center. She kept blaming the media for writing about it. All she had to do, in my opinion, was just acknowledge the problem and say, ‘Yeah, we’ll work on it.’ But they pretend it’s not happening.”
Minner’s refusal to fire Corrections Commissioner Stanley Taylor or Health and Social Services Secretary Vincent Meconi was especially troubling to critics. Her well-known loyalty compelled her to keep the two administrators.
“I sort of just let people who are working in those areas do their job,” Minner says. “We’ve never had a better corrections commissioner than Stan Taylor. He cares very much about what happens in that prison and how he can change the lives of those in there. He took a lot of criticism I thought was unfair. You can talk about any place like a prison or psychiatric hospital. I don’t say we’re perfect, but we have made major changes.
“When we came in, there were a lot of problems [at the hospital], and Vince Meconi and his people have worked very hard to correct as many of them as they could. But you find sometimes you can’t do everything with the limited money you have, and you do the very best you can with what you have to work with. We have proposed for the last two years that we look at the psychiatric center. We need a new one. That’s the key.”
In January 2007, Minner signs Senate Bill 1, which
reforms the worker's compensation system in Delaware.
She poses with members of the Worker’s Compensation
Working Group.
Coasting?
The prison and hospital fiascos contributed to a sharp drop in Minner’s popularity. A Fairleigh Dickinson University poll last October found that only 42 percent of Delaware voters approved of her job performance, compared to 57 percent the previous year.
With about 10 months left in her second term, Minner still hopes to pursue a few new initiatives. Her STAR scholarship program, which aids SEED students who want to move on to a bachelor’s degree, is a priority. So is legislation that would require developers to pay the cost of saving farmland rather than have the state purchase the land for preservation. The legislation was defeated in 2006, but Minner continues to pursue it. “We’d like to get a compromise at least on that,” she says.
She also points to ongoing preventive healthcare initiatives, including the DelaWELL program for state and school district employees, and Know Your Numbers, a campaign urging everyone to learn their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels, as well as efforts to educate school children in healthy eating habits. (She declined to reveal anything more substantive pending her state of the state address in January.)
As a lame duck, it remains to be seen how much she can—or really wants to—accomplish. Peterson expects little legislation from Minner’s office. “I just don’t think she’s engaged any more,” Peterson says. “I think she’s just kind of coasting to the end of her term. I think she’s involved in micromanagement issues, minutia, but I just don’t see any big picture.”
Hoff predicts Minner will continue supporting open space-environmental legislation, making sure wetlands are protected and preventing “a wholesale selling off of farmlands.”
“[It’s] not unlike the end of Bill Clinton’s term,” says Hoff, “where he issued a lot of executive orders relative to environmental issues. Her commitment to that issue can continue, and there are some bills in the General Assembly dealing with that.”
He also believes Minner must lay the groundwork for her successor, especially since she announced support for Carney months ago. “It’s unusual if not inappropriate to have come out so early for another Democratic candidate,” says Hoff. “You have to give her credit for her loyalty, but there is a prospect of a real donnybrook between Mr. Carney and Mr. [Jack] Markell that could result in her handpicked successor losing in the primary. That could be embarrassing, but I don’t think it would be fatal to her legacy.”
She may or may not be in coasting mode, but there are traces of an I-can’t-wait smile on Minner’s face when she discusses her imminent retirement.
“I’m going to do just what I want to do for a change,” she says. “It’s just going to be nice not to have to get up in the morning and look at the schedule and say, ‘Well I can’t do anything I want to do today.’ So I’m not going to be too busy for a while. I’m really going to do what I say: I’m going to retire.”
Her farm in Milford and her family—three sons and their wives, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren—will occupy much of her time. And she’ll no doubt remain influential within the Democratic Party.
But whatever her shortcomings, Minner seems destined to be a signal figure in
