CPRIT Foundation meets timely end

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announcing it is shutting its doors, the fundraising foundation created four years ago by the Legislature to benefit the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas spared lawmakers the necessary task of putting it out of business.

The CPRIT Foundation’s reputation, like the reputation of the cancer agency it was meant to serve, was damaged. Whether the damage was beyond repair was debatable until this week when reports emerged that the foundation unilaterally had renamed itself the Texas Cancer Coalition and walked away from its legislative mandate in the process. The name change left behind legal and financial questions and provoked an investigation by the state attorney general’s office.

There still is faint hope the Legislature and CPRIT’s endorsement of dozens of changes recommended by a bruising state audit can reform the cancer agency. The foundation, on the other hand, haughtily tossed its reputation away. It had to go.

Formed by the Legislature in 2009, the foundation’s very existence always was troubling. If CPRIT was considered important enough to send $3 billion over 10 years its way — voters had authorized the spending in a constitutional referendum — then surely it was important enough for the state to pay top-notch administrators and scientists competitively without forming a private, nonprofit foundation to solicit donations to boost their already six- figure salaries.

It was an arrangement that all but guaranteed questions about conflicts of interest would arise. There were no rules prohibiting the political appointees who sit on CPRIT’s oversight committee, which serves as the agency’s governing board, from also serving on the foundation’s board. There was no demand the foundation follow state disclosure laws. Only when it was under pressure did the foundation release its list of donors in January.

Concerns about the CPRIT Foundation have been bubbling up alongside revelations that CPRIT had awarded at least $56 million in taxpayer-funded grants without subjecting the grant applications to scientific or business review. CPRIT’s chief scientific officer, Nobel laureate Alfred Gilman, and numerous scientists who reviewed grant proposals quit the agency, protesting that political considerations were trumping scientific merit.

Bill Gimson, the agency’s executive director, also resigned. A civil investigation by the attorney general’s office, a criminal investigation by the Travis County District Attorney’s Office and findings by the state auditor that the agency fell short on transparency but was full of suspect judgments compounded CPRIT’s problems.

News that the foundation had reformed itself as the Texas Cancer Coalition and would stop supplementing agency salaries and strike out on its own separate from CPRIT prompted Wayne Roberts, CPRIT’s interim executive director, to ask Attorney General Greg Abbott to investigate. Roberts understandably was curious what the coalition formerly known as the foundation was planning to do with whatever was left of the $4 million raised and spent over the past three years to support CPRIT.

G. David Whitley, an assistant deputy attorney general, wrote a letter to the foundation demanding it explain its legal reasoning for its transformation — a transformation that presumably only the Legislature could authorize. Whitley also demanded the foundation put a hold on money that had been donated to benefit CPRIT until its accounts could be reviewed.

Foundation officials told lawmakers Tuesday they decided to rebrand the foundation to distance it from the controversy surrounding CPRIT, but the foundation was facing controversies of its own. In January, the Houston Chronicle reported that $342,827 of the foundation’s $1 million budget last year went to administrative fees, a percentage for administrative costs far in excess of the norm for nonprofits.

The expenses included a $309,500 retainer to the JHL Co., the consulting firm of Jennifer Stevens, the foundation’s executive director. Until 2011, Stevens also worked for TexasOne, a nonprofit based in Gov. Rick Perry’s office that has raised money to supplement the governor’s travel expenses.

Stevens was hired by Jimmy Man- sour, who serves as chairman of CPRIT’s oversight committee and, until recently, was also on the CPRIT Foundation board, as were Dr. Joseph Bailes, the vice chairman of the oversight committee, and committee member Barbara Canales. That members of the foundation board were also overseeing the cancer agency was the most obvious of the cozy arrangements plaguing the agency and foundation.

The proposed two-year state budget in the Texas House includes no new money for CPRIT. A discussion about ending the agency is justified, though we’re not ready to say CPRIT is hopelessly broken. The Senate passed a bill Wednesday that tightens the reins on the agency and increases its transparency. Unfortunately the Senate bill continues to rely on private donations to supplement CPRIT salaries.

Any reform should begin with the resignation of members of CPRIT’s oversight committee. We’re with Republican state Rep. Charles Perry of Lubbock on this matter, who said on Tuesday: How can legislators vote to fund CPRIT without changes to the board and then tell taxpayers, “We left the guys on the board when all this happened, and we trust they fixed it.”

There is no time for trust. The damage done to a worthwhile effort strongly supported by Texas voters already is moving from shame to disgrace. Only a fresh start and clearly defined parameters can restore CPRIT’s credibility and preserve its future.