Reining in the GIF horse

The longstanding policy by which legislators put surplus money in a General Improvement Fund and helped themselves to equal shares for personal control was so egregious that the kickback scandal it invited seems almost too good for it.

I’ve told the story before, but it deserves retelling for the richness by which it reveals the outrage of this utterly nonsensical process.

—————— I found myself one day years ago equally offended by the existence of the GIF and that a North Little Rock legislator had passed on tens of thousands of her allotment to the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. That’s a private organization existing mainly as a vehicle for a closed fraternity of old Arkansas athletic- establishment white people to honor each other.

I wrote that I thought I’d start the Arkansas Journalists Hall of Fame, make myself the salaried executive director and induct myself in the inaugural class along with Walter Hussman and three posthumous honorees— J. N. Heiskell, Orville Henry and Spider Rowland. All I needed, I wrote, was for one of the 135 legislators to give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars from his or her GIF stash.

The next day a veteran legislator called and said he’d get it done for me if I’d set up the private nonprofit entity needed for formal designation of the funds.

I explained I was joking to advance a point.

I’ve never identified the poor legislative soul because his sin was dimness of bulb, not crookedness. He didn’t ask for any of the money back. I surmised that he thought a journalists’ hall of fame would be a swell thing and he’d be proud to help, especially if it might net him a little good ink.

He’s long gone from the Legislature now.

But here’s the question: What if I’d said OK that day? What if I’d formally set up the entity with a board acting at my behest? I would today— because of my insider status with a single legislator— stand as a member of the Arkansas Journalists Hall of Fame. I might still be the salaried executive director— at maybe a hundred grand a year, which sounds about right for a few hours’ work to plan a banquet— if that legislator or others had continued to funnel me taxpayer cash from the GIF stash every two years.

Nobody would have stopped it. To object to one guy’s little bill to authorize a transfer from the Finance and Administration Department to an Arkansas Journalists Hall of Fame would have invited legislators to object to your own money. And that might complicate the funds you were sending to a little Jesus- claiming college doing a supposed work- study program and graduating conservative voters educated in the image of contemporary Republicanism.

For the record: Along the way the GIF was “reformed” to send the money to planning and development districts, which released it to individual recipients at the direction of the legislators whose money it was understood to be. It was not reform, but charade. It sounds like such an obvious rule: Do not let individual yahoos have singular personal control of taxpayer dollars.

And the irony— well, one of the ironies— is that some of the staunchest advocates of the GIF outrage would tell you with straight faces that they are strict fiscal conservatives, trying hard to keep all these poor people from getting Medicaid or food stamps.

The two former legislators indicted in Northwest Arkansas— former Sen. Jon Woods and former Rep. Micah Neal, accused by federal authorities of receiving kicked- back or laundered shares of the GIF money they directed to that little religion- claiming college in Springdale called Ecclesia … they were a couple of the stoutest proud conservative thinkers in a legislative assembly infested with a buzzing hive of proud conservative thinkers.

The indictment charges that the legislators made the GIF grants and then got paid back shares of the grants that were routed to a consulting firm presumably advising the college but set up, in fact, as a laundry.

It would have been bad form politically and tactically, and invited critical attention, if a legislator had simply put in a little appropriation bill to direct his GIF share directly to his wallet.

You surely understand the genesis of such an outrage as the GIF. Legislators wanted to be able to go home to voters with an actual accomplishment. Their own money for a local project sufficed nicely.

Some of the standard expenditures— for rural volunteer fire department equipment or a community center— were appropriate. But the proper way to make those expenditures would have been in grants administered under prescribed rules and graded objectively by authorized state agencies, and subjected both to pre- audit and post- audit.

Apparently, the GIF as we’ve done it is dead for this session, and, if sanity and propriety prevail, forever.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat- Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @ johnbrummett Twitter feed.