Political Forecast

Since I didn’t feed your news addiction yesterday with CIETC updates, I’ll add some of yesterday’s stories into the stuff coming out today from the Register, which is still the only Iowa newspaper reporting the stuff.

From a nice little fluff piece on State Auditor Dave Vaudt, we learn that the FBI is supposedly finding out a lot more information and following a lot more leads in the CIETC controversy. Still, he doesn’t say if there has been anything blatantly illegal found, but I expect that at some point someone will find something. Newly elected Senate Republican leader Mary Lundby is saying the same thing and expects her party to begin the push to expand government in Iowa by creating an inspector’s office to check into possible government abuses or create an office similar to the federal government’s General Accounting Office (GAO). Maybe it’s just me, but aren’t Republicans supposed to be the party of limited government? Isn’t the expected line from them “This is why we should eliminate aspects of government bureaucracy that allow for oversight of things like this and allow the people to find work and get help on their own by lifting themselves up by their bootstraps?” or something like that? But I digress.

Meanwhile, on Thursday legislator’s finally interviewed former CIETC COO John Bargman about his role with the consortium and his wife’s work for CIETC as a consultant and then as an administrative employee in the state auditor’s office. From the Register:

“The wife of one of the highest-paid executives at the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium was paid to help implement the organization’s accounting system, state lawmakers learned Thursday.

But the state auditor said that he didn’t think Deb Dessert’s role in the implementation of the agency’s accounting system had anything to do with three executives being paid $1.8 million over 30 months.

John Bargman told a legislative panel investigating spending at CIETC that Dessert, his wife, made $60 an hour while working as a consultant at the job training agency. Bargman did not specify when the work was done or how long she had the job.

Dessert, also known as Deb Bargman, continued to do some consulting work for CIETC when in January 2005 she took a new job recruiting and training within the state auditor’s office, Auditor David Vaudt said this week. By then, her husband had been promoted to his role as CIETC’s chief operating officer, which included dealing with the agency’s budget.

“I think the bulk of the work that she did for them was primarily before she joined my office,” Vaudt said. “She was just kind of finishing up her contractual responsibilities.”"

Only one legislator (at least reported by the Register) had the balls to ask about Dessert’s role in the auditor’s office and how your wife wouldn’t know that you’ve been receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses that he probably isn’t qualified for under two years of college, while you’ve been the past financial officer for the Des Moines Business Record, interim director of Iowa Workforce Development, and the head of your own consulting firm. Whether her ignorance or ability to look beyond the excessive salary of her husband is investigation-worthy, I don’t know for sure. But one would think that she would have some kind of professional obligation, or at least feel one, to report to her boss these problems. Or she’s just as complacent about jipping taxpayers and workers out of their money as her husband and Ramona Cunningham are. More than that, its still a question of what did Dave Vaudt know and when did he know it? There are a lot of irregularities in the story, especially since there was a 2004 indepdent report that flagged the same problems just not in the light that the auditor’s investigation did.

We also got another report on Friday confirming that CIETC board member Dan Albritton was paid for consulting services while a member of the board — first highlighted by Bacon on Monday when he found the 2004 independent audit/report on CIETC. And his readers made sure to give him the credit he deserves. Cunningham also supposedly dated this guy, owned a boat with him, and may have even lived with him. I guess she used work for her social dating pool.

All in all, the CIETC mess still has a lot of sketchiness surrounding and I’m pretty sure that Vaudt and Lundby are right to expect this controversy and its subsequent investigations to grow and expose more misdoings. I can’t help but think that this is going to make the legislative session go much longer than it normally would have and is going to impact the gubernatorial race to some extent by essentially ending any chances of the campaigns to get Union money, meaning that the money from AFSCME and the IFL for Blouin won’t get to him before the primary, and Culver won’t get the Machinists’ money. It’ll be interesting to see that effect.

But at least this year’s pages are going to have an experience to remember, especially my friend Ashley Heyer. She’s a page in the House and loves it, from what I hear. Check out this nice little story on this year’s Legislative pages in the Register.