Buzbee, King continue to hit Turner over airport intern
The ad begins with an explosion. Flames engulf City Hall, accompanied by dramatic music and a narrator’s voice: “The bombshell rocking City Hall. Investigations into Mayor Turner and the high-paying internship he created just for this man…”
Mayoral candidate Tony Buzbee’s new television ad is the latest in a series of moves Mayor Sylvester Turner’s opponents have taken to capitalize on a recent report that found Turner signed off on a $95,000-a-year executive internship for a man the mayor initially denied knowing, despite evidence of their prior connections.
At forums, debates, press conferences and in the recent splashy TV ad, Buzbee and Bill King, Turner’s other top mayoral rival, have tried to keep the issue alive less than two weeks from the start of early voting, repeatedly criticizing the mayor for not establishing a competitive internship hiring process and for what they contend was an outsized salary for the 31-year-old intern.
Turner has defended the hire, noting that the intern, Marvin Agumagu, holds three degrees, including a law degree. Turner also has sought to distinguish the internship — which is meant to serve as an entry to a city management training program — from traditional summer roles given to college students.
The mayor also has said he came into office with an emphasis on hiring millennial employees at the city.
“Quite frankly, we need more energy, we need more ideas, we need more innovation,” Turner said at a forum earlier this week.
That argument induced swift backlash from King, the only other mayoral hopeful at the forum, who contended other millennialaged hires under Turner have received annual salaries of far less than $95,000.
King also was skeptical of Turner’s argument that Agumagu’s
hiring fits into his mission of bringing on more young employees.
“If this was really some effort to go out and recruit millennials to come in, why didn’t we have a competition for it?” King said. “Why didn’t we announce this? In fact, what they did, the reason it’s an executive-level position, is because that takes it out of our city rules that require it to be posted and for there to be a competitive process.”
Buzbee, meanwhile, has argued that the incident should diminish public trust in Turner, who at first told KPRC — the station that first reported the story — that he did not know of Agumagu. The mayor later acknowledged he does know Agumagu and said the question “caught me off guard.”
In Buzbee’s TV ad, the narrator states that Turner is “compromised by scandal” and is “a mayor we can’t trust,” tying the issue to Buzbee’s central campaign issue of rooting out backroom, pay-to-play deals at City Hall. Turner repeatedly has denied such deals take place,
amid allegations from Buzbee and King that city contracts get awarded based on who donates to the mayor’s campaign.
Turner’s campaign issued a response to the ad Thursday, saying it is “nothing but random images presented out of context to paint a false picture.”
“Tony Buzbee has sunk to a new low,” Turner said in a statement. “Houstonians are getting another taste of the Trump-style noise and sleaze they’ll have to live through — amplified by the sleazy reporting of KPRC-TV Channel 2 — if Tony Buzbee succeeds in buying his way into office.”
Turner, meanwhile, has begun to punch back emphatically at Buzbee for the corruption allegations, including earlier this week when the mayor’s campaign issued a news release accusing Buzbee and his associates of making campaign contributions to “people in positions of power, who have later substantially helped Buzbee in his career.”
The release went on to cite Buzbee’s more than $300,000 in campaign donations to then-Gov. Rick Perry in 2011 and 2012, before Perry appointed Buzbee to the Texas A&M Board of Regents in 2013. Buzbee has denied on multiple occasions that he makes campaign contributions on the basis of quid pro quo deals.
Political scientists said more details likely would need to emerge for the intern story to sway public opinion against Turner in a meaningful way.
“My general impression is that the scandal is not having much in the way of an adverse effect on Turner’s standing among his supporters,” Rice University political science Professor Mark Jones said. “I think at this point the story has probably run its course, with the only potential additional damage being if there is concrete evidence that the mayor’s been lying about his involvement in this whole process.”
The attempts to capitalize on the intern story are part of the normal course of campaign season, said Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
“We’re in a political campaign, and opponents are always going to attack who is at the top,” Cortina said. “Whatever kind of issue is on the table, they’re going to take it. It’s what happens in political campaigns.”