July 12, 2009 08:01 PM UTC

No-Bid Stimulus Lawyers: What Matters, What Doesn't

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• by: Colorado Pols

Catching up with Governor Bill Ritter’s latest earned media problem, which we’re sorry to say took a little turn for the worse yesterday–as the Denver Post’s Karen “The Shiv” Crummy reports:

Gov. Bill Ritter turned down a $75-an-hour offer from the Colorado attorney general’s office to handle legal matters regarding the disbursement of federal stimulus funds, instead hiring his former law partners for up to six times that cost.

The governor’s lawyers told the attorney general’s office in February that they planned to hire outside counsel to help with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money. Deputy Attorney General Geoff Blue told them his office was willing to do it, but his offer was rejected.

“They thought we didn’t have the expertise or manpower,” said Blue, who handles legal policy and government affairs. “We would’ve gotten the job done. But we told them, ‘That’s your call,’ and we had nothing more to do with it.”

A few weeks later, Ritter hired Hogan & Hartson through a no-bid contract. So far, the firm has been paid $40,000 from federal funds…

Myung Oak Kim, spokeswoman for the governor’s economic-recovery team, said Hogan & Hartson was the right firm for the job.

“We disagreed with the AG’s position that its staff could provide the help we required,” she said. “We needed deep legal expertise on the most complex federal legislation passed in decades, and we needed it quickly.”

But Jenny Flanagan, executive director of the watchdog group Colorado Common Cause, said that even if Hogan & Hartson was the most qualified firm to do the work, the fact that it’s Ritter’s former employer should have “signaled the need for greater transparency.”

The article goes on to explain the legal backing for the contract, an obscure provision in state law that allows some regular contract bidding procedures to be bypassed. Fair enough.

Ritter loyalists had some cover on Friday in responding to Crummy’s first story on the hiring of his former law firm to assist in distributing stimulus money, by claiming that GOP Attorney General John Suthers’ office had “approved” the deal (we heard this informally on Friday, in addition to similar assertions made in comments). Clearly, Suthers was not interested in helping a Democrat out with a little helpfully interpretive corroboration, and his office’s role in this story was essentially to throw Ritter under the wheels. Which as you can see (duh), they did not hesitate to do.

So what have we got here?  

Basically, it’s another situation that will, in all likelihood, not result in any real-word fallout or sanctions against Ritter–since it was legal for this contract to be awarded in the manner it was. But the problem for Ritter is how, legalities aside, this story is politically another absolute goddamn nightmare. Look, we’re willing to accept that the complexities of the stimulus funding and all that compliance paperwork is a huge challenge, for which the best legal minds are called for. We’ll even agree that the highest concentration of such minds in the state of Colorado is quite arguably at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson, and that the work they are doing on the stimulus is in all probability worth every penny being paid to them.

But in a situation where a conflict of interest charge is this easy to level, credibly or not, for God’s sake! Why the hell wouldn’t you go through the perfunctory motions of a bidding process? Hogan & Hartson would have won on the merits over the already-overburdened AG’s office (Suthers is posturing for full partisan effect, just as Ritter should have expected), and above all, doing it this way would have averted another completely unnecessary round of negative press for Ritter.

Everybody’s got their own take on why these things matter, but for us, this is the problem, and it has been the problem for some time–who is watching the Governor’s back politically right now? So much of the damage that has been done to Ritter’s standing, both with his Democratic base and among independent voters with a keen sense for weakness, has been the result of his own political mishandling of situations he is confronted with. Ritter didn’t have to enrage labor and key legislators with the union bills he vetoed, all of it could have been prevented with better advance communication as we’ve said repeatedly. He didn’t have to wait until the last day of the session to casually tell the press he would veto the death penalty repeal, after so many legislators had put their credibility on the line for it. Just like this contract for perfectly justifiable legal services could have been awarded to the same people who have it now, controversy-free, with a slightly less politically ham-fisted approach.

This is what has got to get fixed, and soon–the toxic combination of badly-executed ‘triangulation’ politics against his own base of support with this persistent bureaucratic tone-deafness to the political considerations that actually matter is Ritter’s greatest threat right now, not his Republican challenger(s).