Lawton's Legacy
   Programs for Kids Keep Chiles Alive
   By Diane Hirth
   TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT CAPITOL BUREAU

Fifteen miles from the Capitol, beneath a gray granite slab marked only by his name and the dates 1930-1998, is the grave of Lawton Chiles.

The resting place of the former Florida governor and U.S. senator, a public servant for 40 years, is private, guarded by a bronze statue of Tess, a mongrel dog he befriended at the Governor's Mansion.

On the five-year anniversary of his death from heart failure, the legacy Chiles left to Florida is visibly alive in programs for children. As governor, he began Healthy Start and Healthy Families to nurture the educational, health and social development of infants and toddlers, and expanded the KidCare health-insurance program.

Chiles' vision for a better Florida—like the longleaf pines and live-oak woods where he was buried, the place the "old he-coon" loved— is threatened, however.

Passage of time, a change in administrations and the recession following the 9-11 terrorist attacks have dealt blows to some of his signature programs.

The $11.3 billion in tobacco-settlement money won by Chiles is used now to plug state budget holes, and his nationally acclaimed youth tobacco-prevention program has been clipped down to almost nothing.

Yet those who were close to him say Chiles' example of independent leadership—from a man who laced up boots to walk the length of the state during his first long-shot U.S. Senate race and ran all his campaigns with $10 or $100 contribution limits—remains strong.

"His legacy will stand up, regardless of attempts to modify it or do away with it," said Tallahassee attorney Dexter Douglass, who served as general counsel in the Chiles administration.

"What he would want is to instigate people to continue everything he was doing for children," said Chiles' daughter Tandy Chiles Barrett. "He'd want to say, 'What is happening with the tobacco money? What is happening to all the things we have done?'"

Raise 'em right

At 10 months, Iyana Robinson is trying to walk, pulling herself up with the help of a table edge. She's also jiggling keys and reaching out to everything she can grasp. Healthy and smiling, she has had all her immunizations.

Her mother, Devette Robinson, 24, of Quincy, a developmentally disabled single parent, also is raising 2-year-old Tyrone and 7-year-old Shanteryka.

Robinson has never heard of Chiles.

But, "she taught me some about kids," she said softly of Lola Thompkins, a home-visit worker with the Healthy Families program created by Chiles. "It's OK. She started me asking questions."

Since before Iyana was born, Robinson and Thompkins have worked together on goals—from getting the kids' medical checkups to finding day care for Tyrone. There are also challenges to overcome, such as dealing with a crying child and finding transportation. Robinson, a high-school graduate living on disability income, doesn't have a car.

Healthy Families is designed to prevent child neglect and abuse in families identified as in need of help. Its home-visiting concept has been endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as effective in reducing child maltreatment by at least 40 percent.

But Healthy Families isn't up and running statewide. Fourteen counties, including Jefferson, Madison and Taylor, don't have the program.

Jack Levine, president of Voices for Florida's Children, said Chiles' legacy is unfinished because six times the 14,000 homes now in Healthy Families need the program.

"When you look at kids, his passion ... many of the things he initiated have far outlived him," Levine said.

In its heyday, Florida's youth tobacco-prevention program had substantial funding, considerable state assistance for the volunteer Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) and "Truth" campaign TV ads, which compared deaths caused by cigarettes with mass murder.

Tobacco blues

Today, the $35 million spent last year on youth tobacco prevention is down to $1 million, the Operation SWAT Web site is dead (though The Lawton Chiles Foundation is trying to revive it), and no budget request for the program next year has been submitted to date by the Department of Health.

The $365 million collected this year from Florida's settlement with the tobacco companies is being used to shore up KidCare, Medicaid and programs for elders, as well as funding biomedical research. KidCare has a waiting list of 60,000 children and has cut off new enrollment.

The advisory council to the legislatively created Lawton Chiles Endowment is charged with advising agency heads on tobacco-fund expenditures. But it met only once or twice in the past year, and it is given little information or advance time to examine the issues, said one council member.

Unless something changes, "It just ought to be abolished," said advisory-council member Ted Granger, director of United Way of Florida.

Curt Kiser, lobbyist for the American Cancer Society, said there are a number of efforts under way to revive the program. Blaming the recession and the ensuing tight state budget for the raid on tobacco funds, Kiser said, "I think that more than anything hurt (Chiles') legacy on tobacco programs."

Adrian Abner of Blountstown was a sixth-grader when he met Chiles at a Students Working Against Tobacco gathering.

"I was this quiet person," Abner said. "And he said to me, 'One day, you'll lead this program.'"

Abner became state president of SWAT. Now 19, he is going to Florida A&M University on a Chiles youth-advocacy scholarship and majoring in political science.

"Every time I would get discouraged, I'd always remember what the governor said: 'You're the ones who can do it,'" Abner said. "With the goals he had, and the drive in life, he inspired me to want to be governor. In the next five years, I plan on running for the (state) House."

Never lost an election

Chiles grew up in Lakeland but started and ended his political career in Tallahassee—a wet-behind-the-ears legislator in 1958 and a two-term governor from 1990 to '98.

In between, he brought himself back from a depression so dark that he called it "the blacks" when he left the U.S. Senate after three terms.

As governor, he never persuaded the increasingly Republican-dominated Legislature to embrace tax reform; his effort to provide subsidized health insurance for Florida's working families was rejected by a GOP-ruled state Senate. Yet Chiles' gifts for relating to ordinary Floridians, standing up for his beliefs, seeking consensus and dishing out humor didn't fail him. He never lost an election.

"I watched him have a fairly dogged determination about issues. Sometimes things don't always go your way, but you keep at it, focus on building a consensus," said Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, a Republican former Senate president, of what she learned from this Democratic governor.

"As I go around the state, so many people because of his leadership say, 'I got involved' in their community. It's the most encouraging thing about his legacy," said Bud Chiles of his father.

Past a vine-covered deer stand, down the dirt road of 200-acre Jubilee Plantation in northern Leon County, is his grave site, unveiled to the public Thursday. It can be glimpsed from his "cook shack" and the porch of an old log cabin where a turkey he bagged is mounted over the fireplace.

"Here he came to find peace and listen to his 'inner voice,'" said Kimbel Orr, executive director of The Lawton Chiles Foundation.

Nearby in the brown muck beside a pond, almost extinguished by a blur of deer tracks, is the lone paw print of a raccoon.