PSU Magazine Summer 1987

t Oregon Highway Division. His one– year consulting contract was extended and, in 1974, he became a state employee. Miller gained a reputation around the capital as a clear thinker and talented economist. When, in 1976, the head of the Department of Energy was fired in a public flap involving fau lty energy demand forecasting, Gov. Bob Straub appointed Miller to take his place. "I was surprised by the call, although there was some reason for putting me there," Miller remembers. He successfully refined and clarified the forecast in an atmosphere of controversy and public pressure. "That's what made it fun ." he says. During his years with the Department of Energy, 1976-79, energy tended to be the focal point of important political issues, from energy forecasting to nuclear power and the environment. "At any one time if you had five hot public issues, (energy) was likely to be three or four of them," Miller says. Under the Atiyeh administration, t Miller was appointed head of the 4,500-employee Department of Transportation. Then, when Neil Goldschmidt was elected, he was invited to be part of the transition team. Miller had hardly settled back into his transportation job when the Governor assigned him to his current position as head of the Executive Department. • "The governor came in and said basically, 'You're doing a great job and I want to move you,' " he says. In his potentially most political job to date, Miller has a major role in setting budget priorities among state agencies and is one of a select group that reports directly to the governor. But Miller remains the quintessential manager and analyst. He may have a commanding view of the capitol building now, but Miller still sees his role as one of cutting through the politics to get to the bare facts. (John R Kirkland is a Portland free-lance writer and photographer.) The business of human services W h en Freddye Webb-Petett ('73) was invited to become part of Neil Goldschmidt's transition team, she was bound and determined to stay only through the transition - two months at the most - and then return to her Portland consulting business. "But the governor had other ideas and really convinced me that this job was one I had been working toward all my life," she says. As director of Oregon's Adult and Family Services Division, Webb-Petett is doing on a grand scale what she had been doing since graduating from Portland State: helping the dis– advantaged. It is her job to oversee the $400 million agency that handles programs including aid to dependent children, food stamps, medical assistance to the poor and job-seeking help for welfare recipients. "It's an excitingjob," says Webb– Pet.ett. "It's a challengingjob, and it's an opportunity to put into practice statewide some of the things I had done on a much smaller scale in how a service organization ought to operate." How did a business administration major end up working in non-profit public assistance organizations for almost 15 years? That unusual combination makes perfect sense; it is because she knows how to run a business that she has been so successful in her non-profit activities. For example, she spent six years - from 1979 to 1985 - as the executive director of Portland's Urban League, part of a national organization to boost employment, education, youth and senior services in cities. She wanted it to be more visible to the community, she wanted it to own property, which it hadn't done before, and she wanted it to form stronger links with other organizations. She accomplished those goals and more, guiding the Urban League from PSU MAGAZINE PAGE 11 Freddye Webb-Perett ('73) Director, Adult and Family Services a staff of 30 people and a budget of $50,000 to a staff of 50 people and a budget of $2.5 million. "And that was at a time when other service programs were being cut. What I did at the Urban League was to bring to bear those management skills that I had learned at the business school at Portland State," she says. Webb-Petett grew up in Rayville, Louisiana in the '40s and '50s, a time and place in which segregation was not just a way of life; it was the law. For an educated black woman, there were few opportunities other than teaching, which she did not want to do. She spent a year attending the all– black Southern University in Baton Rouge and marching in civil rights demonstrations. Then, on a trip out to Portland to visit her father in 1962, Webb-Petell and her new husband decided to stay. She immediately enrolled in college and for the next