Bonnen hiked taxpayer share of aides’ pay
Raises came after cut in campaign subsidies; speaker says overall office budget down 30%
AUSTIN — Lame duck Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, leaving office after he was caught on tape plotting against fellow Republican legislators, boosted the taxpayer-funded salary of several top aides just as he was cutting the amount he gives them from donated campaign funds, records show.
Bonnen’s office said campaign work dried up after he decided to bow out of politics and noted his overall payroll expenditures dropped as staffers have departed and weren’t replaced.
Political watchdogs say the expenditures, while legal, suggest Bonnen is treating the state treasury like it’s his own money while ensuring the pot of cash he received in his campaign account — which he can control and use for years — remains as big as possible once he’s out of office.
Bonnen’s campaign funds totaled about $3.4 million as of June 30, records show.
“It’s essentially trying to squeeze as much as you can out of your taxpayer-funded accounts so as to protect your campaign accounts,” said Mark Jones, political scientist at Rice University. “It’s somewhat untoward to be paying these people that much out of your officeholder account, which is why you originally used your campaign account.”
The new staff salaries range as high as $280,000 annually, records show.
It’s not unusual for top state officials to boost the take-home pay of their top staffers by giving them supplemental salaries from campaign accounts. Watchdogs have criticized the practice, arguing that the politicians become more beholden to wealthy donors because they come to rely on the money to attract and retain talent at the Capitol. But the Ethics Commission long ago deemed the arrangement legal.
Bonnen, an Angleton Republican first elected to the House in
1996, was elevated to the powerful post of speaker in 2019. But a self-inflicted wound soon after the session ended left his political career in tatters.
In a meeting at the Capitol with far-right activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, Bonnen trashtalked fellow Republicans and dangled favors to Sullivan. In late October, after Sullivan publicly released the secretly recorded audio of the meeting, Bonnen announced he would not run for reelection this year.
Not long after, the speaker began boosting the state salaries of top aides.
Funding sources switched
Bonnen effectively replaced the money his aides lost from his campaign officeholder account with money from state coffers. The taxpayer money flowed in just as the donor money went out — all just a few weeks after Bonnen announced he would retire from the Texas House.
Case in point: In December of last year, Bonnen chief of staff Gavin Massingill saw his campaign salary drop from $10,000 a month to $5,000 a month. The same month, his state pay increased by the exact amount he lost: it went from $18,333 a month to $23,333, an annualized state salary of about $280,000.
Likewise, the Republican speaker’s top lawyer and policy adviser, Gardner Pate (now an aide to Gov. Greg Abbott) had his campaign salary reduced by $3,000 in December. His government salary went up by $3,083 — to $17,666 — the same month. That’s an annual state salary of about $212,000.
At least five more Bonnen aides — for a total of seven — got substantial state raises just as private campaign payments decreased by identical or similar amounts, records show. Another five got state raises after the taping scandal exploded but don’t show up on campaign reports or had minimal payments there to begin with. Adjustments included:
• District affairs coordinator
Jessica Follett got a $1,000 monthly raise in December and lost her $1,000 monthly campaign salary the next month. She was making an annualized state salary of about $82,000 as of July.
• Digital media coordinator Caroline McKinney saw her monthly state salary rise by $1,250 in December only to lose her monthly campaign salary of $1,250 the same month. Her most recent annualized state salary was $80,000.
• Office director Shera Eichler got a $3,000-a-month state raise in December and had a campaign salary cut of $2,550 in January. Her most recently available annualized state salary was $201,000.
• Administrative coordinator Kimberly Tharel gained $300 a month from the state in December but lost the same amount from the campaign; her state salary has gone up twice since then, to a total of $5,834 a month, an annualized state salary of $70,000, records show.
Spokeswoman Cait Meisenheimer, who became the public face of the speaker’s office as scandal engulfed it, received two state salary bumps that coincided with similarly timed drops in campaign payments. In August 2019, just as the secret recording of Bonnen began to threaten the speaker’s reign, the speaker promoted Meisenheimer to communications director and raised her monthly salary by about $4,300, pushing it from $6,667 to $11,000 a month. The next month, Meisenheimer’s campaign salary dropped by $1,500 a month.
In December, a little over a month after the secret tape scandal forced the speaker to announce an early retirement from politics, Bonnen raised Meisenheimer’s state salary again, this time by $1,500 a month, to a monthly total of $12,500, which works out to an annualized state salary of $150,000, Texas House records show. The next month, state filings show, her monthly campaign salary dropped by $1,300.
Beginning in February, a separate political fund created by Bonnen, Texas Leads PAC, started paying both Eichler and Meisenheimer $400 a month, according to the most recent reports that go through June of this year.
A budget reduction
State ethics rules allow state politicians to hang on to their campaign money for years, and many of them use it to continue wielding influence at the Texas Capitol, donate to their favorite charities and pay for a variety of expenses, including travel and meals.
In written statements to the Houston Chronicle, Meisenheimer said Bonnen’s office expenses went down by almost a third as people have left and weren’t replaced, meaning existing staffers had to pick up the slack.
“Speaker Bonnen made the choice to save taxpayer dollars and cut operational costs by asking members of our current team to take on greater responsibilities rather than rehiring for positions, and that decision has successfully led to a 31 percent reduction in our office budget,” she said.
Rather than defend her own salary increase, which Meisenheimer said was “awkward” and “a little bit insulting,” she sent a statement directly from Bonnen, who accused the Chronicle of “suggesting that a woman is not entitled to the same compensation as a male counterpart, despite having earned the same job title and responsibilities.”
Meisenheimer was promoted to communications director from press secretary — and her salary shot up as a result — when her male predecessor, Gene Acuña, left the speaker’s office last summer.
Anthony Gutierrez, executive director for the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause Texas, said the Legislature needs to tighten disclosure rules to ensure people who work for elective officials in Texas are giving the public more details about what they’re doing to justify both their state and political salaries.
“It definitely doesn’t sound like there is something illegal here, but it certainly borders on unethical,” Gutierrez said. “Clearly what’s happening here is you just decided you wanted to give some people some more money, and it’s taxpayers who are footing the bill for these raises.”
Meisenheimer responded: Would the “so-called watchdogs” prefer, she asked, “that an outgoing speaker — in an interim (between sessions) no less — hire people to fill vacated positions, thus spending more taxpayer money on salaries?”