The latest revealing anecdote about McCrory's pay to play scandal
Published December 10, 2015
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, December 9, 2015.
It seems that every time there’s a new development in the pay the play prison maintenance scandal in the McCrory Administration, there’s another telling anecdote that doesn’t make the headlines but illustrates the fundamental problem in the way the administration conducts itself.
This time it involves the state plane.
The basics of the story are not in dispute. McCrory’s friend and campaign donor Graeme Keith Sr. was upset that his $3 million prison maintenance contract was not going to be renewed because officials in the Department of Public Safety found that it wasn’t saving the state money.
The News & Observer reported last month that McCrory convened a meeting in Charlotte with Keith and administration officials to talk about the contract. A memo about the meeting said that McCrory made a few brief remarks and then turned things over to Keith who reminded folks that he had given money to politicians and expected something in return.
McCrory said he was engaged in a side conversation and didn’t hear the remarks and would have ended the meeting if he had. Keith subsequently brought up his contributions a few more times to McCrory’s DPS Secretary Frank Perry, a former FBI agent.
After intensive involvement by McCrory’s Budget Director Lee Roberts and Chief of Staff Thomas Stith, Keith’s contract was eventually renewed for another year over the objection of Perry and other DPS officials.
This week the News & Observer reported that another page of the memo written by DPS staff and recently released by the department showed that McCrory himself called Perry twice about Keith’s contract expiring before McCrory called the meeting.
The N&O story also revealed that McCrory offered to fly Secretary Perry and his staff to the Charlotte meeting on the state plane but Perry declined.
That was apparently a very important meeting for McCrory.
It’s no secret in Raleigh that McCrory uses the plane frequently to fly home for the weekend even when it doesn’t save time when you factor in travelling from the Governor’s Mansion to the RDU airport and then McCrory’s trip home from the Concord airport to his house.
But it’s astonishing that he was willing to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to fly several members of his administration to Charlotte on a separate trip just to meet with a campaign donor upset about a contract.
McCrory told the News & Observer that it’s not unusual for him to get involved in even small disputes but this was no ordinary disagreement if he was willing to dispatch the state plane to bring officials to the donor instead of asking him to drive to Raleigh to make his case.
Or maybe not. Perhaps McCrory is always willing to fly his team around the state to meet with anyone who is not happy with a contract or state purchasing decision. Maybe that’s what he means when he says his making government more customer friendly.
And maybe Keith’s political donations had nothing to do with it. A pending FBI investigation is likely to clear that up.
But it’s hard not to think a text sent by Perry to Lee Roberts after Keith’s contract was renewed sums up this whole episode.
“Very bad decision,” Perry wrote. Sorry, but this will soil our Gov …”
It already has.
