Spin City

[January 17th, 2007] While the Oregon Legislature works to close the revolving door that lets its ex-members go immediately into the lucrative world of lobbying, there's been no move to place such restrictions on senior state bureaucrats.

A prime example of the latter is the recent career switch by Paddy McGuire, who until Dec. 28 was the top assistant (making $122,000 a year) to Secretary of State Bill Bradbury.

Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli (R-John Day) says McGuire's move to a firm that's profited from contracts with the Secretary of State's Office reveals what his legislative colleagues should focus on preventing.

"The move from legislator to lobbyist is probably the most innocuous," Ferrioli says. "What about legislator to state agency head or agency head to contractor?"

McGuire's bio, until this week posted on Bradbury's website, portrays him as a consummate Democratic insider. McGuire is a former executive director of the Democratic Party of Oregon, a two-time state director for the Clinton-Gore campaign, and a onetime senior bureaucrat in the Clinton administration and at the Bonneville Power Administration.

Since joining Bradbury's team in 2000, McGuire has managed the daily operations of all seven divisions of the Secretary of State's Office.

That means all of the office's 207 employees reported to him; he was responsible for approving salaries, vacations and other details of their employment.

Starting in August 2003, McGuire oversaw one of Bradbury's most ambitious undertakings: the creation of a "statewide voter file." That project grew out of the vote-counting controversy in the 2000 presidential elections. In hopes of avoiding another Florida fiasco, Congress mandated that each state collect and maintain an accurate list of all voters, rather than letting each county run its own show.

In August 2003, records show that Oregon's Elections Division, under McGuire's supervision, hired Saber Consulting (now Saber Corp.) to build its voter file over a two-year period, at a price tag of $10.5 million. McGuire served as the "project sponsor" and plugged Saber in a 2004 speech before the Federal Election Assistance Commission in Chicago.

Financially, the contract with the Elections Division, which is part of the Secretary of State's Office, was a coup for Saber. According to company documents, its revenues totaled only $6.5 million in 2003 and $8.8 million in 2004.

After landing the Oregon contract, Saber, then headquartered in Salem but now in Portland,obtained contracts to build voter files for five other states: Missouri, Mississippi, Iowa, Montana and Maryland.

In September 2005, Saber won yet another contract to provide training and mentoring for Oregon elections technical personnel and to build a system that would allow real-time entry of contribution-and-expenditure data by candidates and political committees. That contract, which is spread over several phases, is expected to cost the state about $3 million, according to elections director John Lindback.

So, where is all this going? Well, this week, McGuire began a new job—as Saber's VP for election services.

Existing laws bar senior public employees at several state agencies from immediately going to work for companies that appear before, or do business with, those agencies.

If McGuire had worked for the Public Utility Commission, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, the Department of Consumer and Business Services or the Insurance Division, he would have been barred for at least a year from taking a job at a company those agencies regulate. If McGuire had worked for the state treasurer, he wouldn't have been allowed to take a job at any company with which the state had invested even a nominal sum. Similar restrictions govern the employment of departing employees at the departments of Justice and State Police and at the Oregon State Lottery.

But the Secretary of State's Office, which through its Audits Division watches over the ethics of all other state agencies, operates under no such restrictions.

"That's a problem," says Janice Thompson of the watchdog Money in Politics Research Action Group. "Situations where people obtain jobs based on the skills and contacts acquired under state employment are troubling.... The Legislature should examine conflict-of-interest policies for all high-level staff."

The concern Thompson has is that McGuire's job with Saber could represent a payback for previous state contracts or the follow-on success Saber enjoyed after getting the Oregon voter file contract.

McGuire says his involvement in selecting Saber was three and a half years ago. He says his new job is no payback, nor comparable to a legislator turned lobbyist. "I'm not selling anything, nor will I be trying to influence policy," McGuire says. "My job is to keep our elections customers—including the Secretary of State's Office—happy."

It is indisputable, however, that he will use what he learned as Bradbury's top deputy to Saber's advantage.

Ferrioli thinks that's wrong, saying, "These kind of moves are just not OK."