Jake Files believes in “governmental transparency and openness,” or so he said on his campaign website when he was asking Fort Smith voters to give him his current seat in the Arkansas Senate back in 2014. He’s not the first politician to be hoisted with his own petard — a Shakespearean idiom meaning to be blown up by one’s own bomb.
Campaign promises about transparency also came back to bite former Lt. Gov. Mark Darr, champion of an online “checkbook” of state expenditures before he resigned after revelations of improper use of campaign funds and state reimbursements, and State Auditor Andrea Lea, who as a candidate declared that “transparency should be the foundation of any public office” but after being sworn in insisted that her staff send emails to her private account from their private accounts.
Sen. Files was the subject of a complicated but important report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Sunday, Feb. 19. In it, veteran reporter Lisa Hammersly laid out a truly astonishing story in which Files admitted that he submitted fake bids to the Western Arkansas Planning & Development District on behalf of two companies with which he had no official connection. He also submitted the winning low bid on behalf of an unlicensed subcontractor with whom he had previously done business and acknowledged that he forged her name on an IRS document.
The money that Fort Smith spent on this particular contract, to install water and sewer lines to a new softball complex, came from the state’s controversial General Improvement Fund — money that Files himself directed the WAPDD to give to the city to pay the subcontractor Files chose. And until earlier this month, a nonprofit that Files incorporated had a contract to manage construction of the complex.
One of the astonishing things is that Files admitted all that by way of defending himself. He told Hammersly that he didn’t “see any conflict at all or ethical concerns,” since he was practically a volunteer, taking more than $1 million for a project that is months behind schedule. The bridge too far for Files was not forging someone’s IRS documents or submitting fake bids; it was the fact that the two companies whose bids he faked claimed to know nothing about it.
That, Files said, wasn’t true, and he said he could — but didn’t — produce phone call records and texts to prove that he really had discussed the bids with the other subs.
Alrighty then.
It’s not for me to say whether Sen. Files committed a crime, although a private attorney hired by the city to review the situation suggested that the “irregularities” in the bid process could violate the law. If I were inclined to pull out the ol’ Moritz Scale of Political Bad Behavior for the second month in a row, I would give him a 4: hypocrisy and/or “tacky” behavior compounded by recklessness and/or stupidity.
I’m tempted to rerun a column I wrote in 2015 about what I call my one-way test for deciding ethical questions: Would it be OK if everyone did this?
Would it be OK if every taxpayer-funded construction bid was let based on fake bids? I’m pretty sure that even Jake Files knows the answer to that.
The last politician I ranked on the Moritz Scale was former state Rep. Micah Neal. The General Improvement Fund, the pork barrel of goodies that legislators thought they just had to have even after it was declared unconstitutional, was also his downfall. He pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks from a couple of nonprofits to which he directed GIF money.
GIF is going to be the undoing of more legislators, former legislators and people who once smugly congratulated themselves for their clever connections with legislators. And in the end, defense lawyers will end up with more money than any of them originally received by working the system, and the taxpayers will get stuck for room and board.
In the future, politicians who really don’t want to be transparent should probably avoid making that promise. Along with the fact that evangelical Christians will enthusiastically support a thrice-married adulterer who bragged about sexual assault and can’t name the books of the New Testament, one of the counterintuitive lessons we’ve learned from President Trump is that transparency about personal financial conflicts of interest is for losers.
Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |