Don’t Lie to Reporters

Cross-posted from Blue News Tribune.

As Chris Rock once said (and, if memory serves, later proved), you can’t cheat because you’re gonna get caught.

Contradicting a series of steadfast denials, internal e-mails show that Governor Deval Patrick’s top aides controlled the appointment of state Senator Marian Walsh to a high-paying job at a state authority, from setting her salary to crafting her job description.

(snip)

“I would deny that,” he said when asked if the Patrick administration engineered the hiring. “We have been looking for the additional staff expertise since I got on the board. We have been working with the administration to figure that out. But I do not consider this an orchestrated matter.”

The e-mails indicate, however, that Larson and his staff worked closely with Gonzalez, Patrick’s undersecretary of administration and finance, in the days leading up to the board’s decision on March 12 to hire Walsh as a $175,000 a year assistant executive director. (After Patrick’s action kicked up a political firestorm, Walsh requested this week that the salary be reduced to $120,000.)

A sprinkle of good news — they cooperated rather than claim executive privilege.

The e-mails were released to the Globe after a public records request.

I had a few state jobs when I was younger — summer jobs, not exactly hot on the market, but still, a nice gig for a kid (compared to McDonald’s, for example). So it’s no surprise to me that the governor’s staff would help an ally, and I still believe Marian Walsh deserves this job as much as anybody. However:

The day before the board meeting where Walsh was formally selected, Gonzalez told Caswell that Rubin would create the job description that would be presented to the board. Caswell had already written and sent to Gonzalez a two-page job description for an assistant executive director. But that job description outlined duties that included working to develop new projects and procure new financing, expertise that Walsh did not possess.

The revised description, which is one paragraph, focused her duties on government-relations work, including merging the agency with the Massachusetts Development Authority, and not on tax exempt capital financing.

This contradicts my earlier point about the Legislature leaving this position open for a valid reason. If the job description was so vague that Doug Rubin could simply rewrite it to suit his need, then clearly it was merely inertia that left it vacant. (Or design; maybe someone in the Legislature had an eye on the job too.)

So, a not terribly big deal becomes a big deal because of the administration’s sloppiness. On WBUR yesterday, this scandal was cited as a factor in the governor’s ever-dropping poll numbers.

There might be justice in that. It’s not just that this is bad governance. It’s bad governance done poorly.

Note: I’ll be in and out a lot today, so I might be slow to reply.

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