Good ol' boys went too far on GOP float
Bob Bernick Jr.
You see it all the time, year in and year out.
Maybe it's a big gaff, like former Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini asking "friends" for $10,000 a pop so she could keep up the mortgage payments on her house.
Or former Salt Lake County Mayor Nancy Workman providing county funds to a private nonprofit that employed her daughter.
Maybe the errors are smaller, like powerful politicians asking a favor from a local college president, and then thinking that nothing was done improperly because no public funds were inappropriately spent.
But it is the appearance of wrongdoing — even if there was no legal wrongdoing on the part of the politicians, like the two mayors — that saps the public's good opinion of elected and appointed public officials alike.
The latest gaff comes in the building of a float by the Mountainland Applied Technology College in Utah County.
Here are the facts as revealed in an audit by state Auditor Austin Johnson and interviews with legislators:
Leading Utah County legislators Sen. Curt Bramble, Senate majority leader from Provo, and Rep. Becky Lockhart, Executive Appropriations co-vice chairwoman, also from Provo, and other local Republicans decided it would be a nice thing if the Utah County Republican Party had a float to drive in a number of summer parades.
Along with Bramble, the pair hit upon the idea of seeing if the MATC — which basically teaches all kinds of skills like plumbing, welding, computer science and so on — had a welding class that, as a class project, would build the frame.
Lockhart says she and Bramble approached Clay Christensen, campus president of MATC whom they knew well, and asked if such a thing was possible.
Lockhart promises that from the very first, she offered to write Christensen a private check to cover the costs. Christensen said maybe someone at his college could build this thing. He told Lockhart to wait for any payments, as he didn't know the cost yet.
The car is delivered. The metal frame is built. The float is finished.
Lockhart said she, again, offered to write a check. In state audit work papers, Bramble says he, too, offered to pay. But Christensen said no — that an anonymous donor had come forward to pay for the work.
Lockhart says she doesn't know who that donor was, nor the ultimate cost of the welding work and materials.
While Johnson didn't name the donor in his audit, he told me it was Don L. Ipson, the citizen chairman of the Utah College of Applied Technology, the group that oversees all of the state's applied technology colleges, including MATC.
Recent comments
Politicians in Utah see no need to be reflective on their behavior...
mrhackman | Aug. 24, 2007 at 11:34 a.m.
Thanks so much. Please keep shining light into the dark spaces of...
S Ferrin | Aug. 24, 2007 at 8:38 a.m.
Gee Bob,
You're amazed? This is just normal for politicians...
Jim Schoes | Aug. 24, 2007 at 2:10 a.m.
