Karras, named chairman of the Board of Regents that oversees the state's colleges and universities by a previous governor, says Huntsman had a good first session with the GOP-controlled Legislature and seems to be making progress.

Huntsman still has six regents to appoint and 36 individual trustees to name to boards of individual public institutions of higher education. "We'll see how he does," Karras said of the critical appointments.

Karras was friends with former governors Olene Walker and Mike Leavitt, and he would get calls — or felt comfortable in calling — those governors to "get a feel" for who may get appointed to the college boards.

That back-door channel hasn't opened with Huntsman. "We (on the Board of Regents) need to find our footing" with the new governor, "and that's natural," says Karras, whose term is not up this year.

Walker was knocked out of the May 2004 GOP convention in her run for the office she inherited from Leavitt six months earlier, when he left in the middle of his third term to join the Bush administration.

Walker said Huntsman had a few missteps — the way he fired the state's economic development/tourism officials his first two weeks in office and the manner in which he joined a lawsuit against a controversial national park in southern Utah.

"Those are learning experiences — it's not what he did, but how he did it," she said several weeks ago before leaving for New York City with her husband to head a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"This is the case with all new administrations, especially when top people were not involved in state government" before, Walker said.

Huntsman kept about half of the department heads from the Walker/Leavitt years, but his immediate staff — except for budget director Richard Ellis — had not worked in state government and had little experience in dealing with the Legislature.

For example, when former Gov. Norm Bangerter (who had earlier served as a Utah House speaker) and Leavitt first came into office, they both tapped people to be their chiefs of staff who had extensive state government experience.

Huntsman picked his campaign manager, Jason Chaffetz, who while having some legislative contacts before, had really only run a few political campaigns while working as an executive for NuSkin, a Utah-County-based personal grooming and health-care firm.

"But overall, things have gone well," Walker said. "The state is doing well (financially), certainly for a new administration."

Huntsman stops short of saying he made any mistakes in the way he's handled the overhaul of the state's economic development efforts. "Process-wise, you can always do things a little more artfully," he said.