7 new to Huntsman Cabinet

Also, Chaffetz said, Huntsman may recommend putting all of the state's information technology employees under a single agency run by a more powerful chief information officer. Almost all of those employees are now scattered throughout state government.

Wednesday's announcement focused on the new faces Huntsman is bringing into state government. He kept 10 members of former Gov. Olene Walker's Cabinet and is keeping two acting department directors on while he continues to search for their replacements.

Two of the holdovers from the Walker administration, Pam Hendrickson of the Tax Commission and Mike Sibbett of the Board of Pardons, serve specific terms and are not yet up for reappointment. If they were to be retained, Huntsman's 19-member Cabinet would have just seven new members.

So for all the talk of change, a number of familiar faces remain.

Among the new Cabinet appointments announced by Huntsman is the state's first Hispanic woman Cabinet member, Sylvia Haro, who would head up the new Department of Community and the Arts.

And it's become tradition for a governor to select one recognized member of the opposition party to serve in his or her Cabinet. GOP legislators used to grumble that former GOP Gov. Mike Leavitt had too many Democrats among his top aides and staffers.

Huntsman picked D'Arcy Dixon Pignanelli as his token Democrat. Pignanelli has run for state office before as a Democrat and is the wife of former Utah House Minority Leader Frank Pignanelli, who ran as a Democrat for Salt Lake City mayor in 2003.

D'Arcy Pignanelli thus fulfills two roles in the GOP administration: a woman and a Democrat. She'll head the state Department of Administrative Services, perhaps the least political of any department. Administrative Services is a catch-all department that oversees functions such as finance, purchasing and the vehicle fleet.

Still, Huntsman's Cabinet with two top positions still unfilled — Human Services and Workforce Services — is short on female faces.

The Leavitt/Walker administration had five women in top posts toward the end of its last term.

Huntsman's Cabinet has three women, Pignanelli, Haro and Environmental Quality executive director Dianne Nielson, who continues in the post.

Both Human Services and Workforce Services were directed by women in the previous administration; Huntsman could still choose women for those jobs.

Huntsman said he picked the best person for the job, whether that was a woman, man, Democrat or Republican. But he also said he was fulfilling a campaign pledge by naming a Hispanic Cabinet member.