Let’s imagine you’re a business owner and you discover that your office manager is running her own personal business on company time. Instead of doing work for your company, the workers in your office are busy stuffing envelopes for the manager’s business, making phone calls to get her more clients, visiting her potential clients on company time and keeping the books for her business, using your computers. If one of the staff informed you of the situation and presented written documentation to back it up, and if the culprit admitted engaging in the offenses, what would you do?
Of course, you would fire her and then prosecute her for stealing from you. “I paid you $80,000 a year to look after my interests, and you ripped me off,” you tell her. “You’re fired!” She just shrugs and says, “We’ll see about that.” Sure enough, after you spend $200,000 taking her to court, the decision comes down: she can keep her job and you have to continue paying her salary until her contract is up – another two years.
How would you feel? Or, to rephrase that: how DO you feel, because this scenario isn’t imaginary at all – it actually happened to you, and to all of Nevada’s taxpayers. State Controller Cathy Augustine is back at work after getting her wrist slapped by the Nevada Senate. She admitted using state employees, equipment and resources to help in her 2002 re-election campaign. While other candidates were spending their own time compiling campaign contribution and expense reports, or paying professionals to do it for them, Augustine was using staff paid for by the taxpayers. Former executive assistant Jennifer Normington testified that, among other things, she gave campaign speeches during work hours, stuffed envelopes and kept track of campaign contributions on her state computer.
Attorney General Brian Sandoval’s office conducted a year-long investigation after receiving evidence of wrongdoing from employees in the Controller’s office. To avoid felony criminal charges, Augustine agreed to admit she “should have known” that what her employees were doing violated ethics laws. She was fined $15,000, the largest fine ever levied by the ethics commission.
State law requires constitutional officers who “willfully” violate ethics laws to be referred to the Legislature for impeachment. The articles of impeachment charged Augustine with misusing her staff and office, saying she “demonstrated a lack of honesty, principles and good morals.” The law she violated states a public officer “shall not use government time, property, equipment or other facilities to benefit his personal or financial interest.” Augustine was tried and convicted of three charges by the Assembly, making her the first elected official in Nevada history to be impeached.
Nevada taxpayers assumed justice was going to be done and that our elected officials were holding her accountable for her dishonesty. But then the trial shifted to the Senate, and the political winds apparently shifted as well. The senators asked the Legislative Counsel Bureau (LCB) for a ruling on Augustine’s actions. The LCB report declared that it is acceptable for “unclassified employees” (those appointed to their jobs by a politician) to complete campaign contribution and expense reports for their elected bosses because compiling these reports “is in the state’s interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption in the political process.” How can you justify corruption (using state personnel and equipment) by saying that you’re just trying to prevent corruption? Only a politician would have thought of that one.
Using this ruling as an excuse to let her off the hook, the Senate acquitted Augustine of the charges of using state employees and state computers to conduct her re-election campaign. This left only one charge, and the senators decided the punishment for that was a vote of censure. Not dismissal from office, not suspension without pay. If this were a hockey game, she would have been sent to the bench for a 10-second penalty.
After a special legislative session that cost taxpayers between $150,000 and $200,000, a triumphant Augustine crowed that she had been “vindicated.” She had already admitted her guilt in using our money for her own purposes, which amounts to stealing from taxpayers’ pockets. Now she has the nerve to rub our noses in it.
Sen. John Lee (D-Las Vegas) was quoted as saying, “I feel that 2004 was the year we kicked the final dirt on the grave of ethics in Nevada. There is no ethics in Nevada and no reason to be ethical.” In an op-ed piece, the Las Vegas Review-Journal said, “The outcome of this case only encourages the elected political class in Carson City to see their offices as an entitlement, and to view the constitutional safeguards erected to protect the public trust as minor inconveniences, ever more easily ignored.”
But wait – it gets worse! Now Augustine says she won’t rule out running again. This is an insult to the taxpayers of Nevada. Maybe she thinks voters are too stupid to remember or care about what happened in the 2002 campaign and what that said about her personal and professional ethics. I hope she’s wrong. When her term as Controller expires in 2006, she may decide to seek higher office. I already have a campaign slogan ready for her: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
