Victor, Spoils, Etc. (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

It’s not my job to defend Robert Stebbins, recently fired as sales director for the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery. I’m not in a position to do that, although I have been acquainted with Stebbins since I became editor of this publication in 1999. We have had only occasional contact of the run-into-each-other-at-lunch, Facebook-birthday-greetings variety since he left Metropolitan National Bank in 2009, shortly before he joined the brand-new lottery.

Still, I was gobsmacked by how his termination went down, both on the part of the lottery and then by the under-reported, overplayed articles that appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

I do not dispute the authority of Lottery Director Bishop Woosley or of his new boss, Department of Finance & Administration Director Larry Walther, to hire and fire anyone they want, with or without good cause. This is a right-to-work state, as I’m keenly aware every day when I arrive to do a job that I’m not guaranteed to have when 5 p.m. rolls around.

I don’t dispute their authority to waive the written requirement that Stebbins’ replacement as sales director have a college degree. I’m a fan of higher education, but anyone who has been in the workforce for more than 20 minutes realizes that a college degree and skills don’t always come in the same package.

If Woosley and/or Walther wanted to make a change in that position, I’ve got no beef with that. The guy they hired even before Stebbins knew he was being fired, Mitch Chandler, had worked with Walther at a state agency before, so Walther knows his skills. Walther clearly believes that Chandler will be more valuable to the lottery than Stebbins ever was, because — despite his lack of direct experience or college degree — he managed to get a starting salary higher than Stebbins was making after almost six years.

Well, that’s Walther’s prerogative. And paying more to people with fewer on-paper qualifications seems to be acceptable in the Hutchinson administration. The lottery has fewer employees than it had before it was brought under the DF&A umbrella by legislation passed this spring, so maybe there were some extra dollars rattling around for salaries. (But fewer — millions fewer — for scholarships, of course.)

I do think that, because Stebbins had been employed there from the beginning and without any indication that he committed some monumental screw-up, he could have been given more than one day’s notice that he was about to be dependent upon COBRA for health insurance. Even out here in the cold, cruel private sector, management-level employees generally get some kind of severance package and some grace on their employer-sponsored insurance.

But, hey, that’s life in the big city, right? Especially in government jobs when there’s a new administration and a new management structure.

Here’s where it got really ugly: The Democrat-Gazette’s regular lottery reporter was out when news that Stebbins had been sacked leaked out. And the reporter who tackled the story knew just enough to be dangerous.

Although Woosley confirmed that Stebbins had been told to resign or be fired, he wouldn’t otherwise comment on the change. Because Stebbins’ title was sales director, the reporter apparently assumed that he was responsible for ticket sales, which, as everyone knows, have been trending downward for three years. And Woosley told him nothing to the contrary. So anyone who read the story on the front page — the front page, for Pete’s sake — of the D-G on June 30 would naturally assume that the lottery was finally getting rid of the guy personally responsible for those dreadful ticket sales numbers.

The reporter didn’t know, so his readers didn’t know, that Stebbins’ primary responsibility was contracting and servicing the retailers who sell the tickets. I assume every employee of the lottery ultimately has the mission of selling more tickets to raise more scholarship money, but Stebbins had no input into the games and no hand in the marketing of the tickets. And when the state’s fiscal year ended on June 30, the retailer count was less than 1 percent below its high at the end of the first year of ticket sales.

The reporter also didn’t know anything about Mitch Chandler — nor, apparently, did Woosley — so readers of his first article couldn’t draw what I think is the correct conclusion: Larry Walther, having a new division to run, decided to give a six-figure job to someone he wanted to work with again. The end.

It should have been a brief on page B3, not a front-page story.

And if lottery revenue fails to improve, don’t blame Mitch Chandler. 

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.