By Bill Minor
Syndicated Columnist
JACKSON -- The recent dust-up over a high-ranking staffer at the Department of Economic and Community Development, leaving DECD through the "revolving door" to take a cushy job in an advertising agency whose state contract he oversaw, has settled down for now. But maybe not for long.
It was the case of Denton Gibbes, who had been Jimmy Heidel's right hand man at DECD, going straight away for a top job at The Ramey Agency, which handles several million dollars in DECD advertising contracts and is also kept on a handsome retainer.
What makes the Gibbes case more sticky is that he had been known as the contact person for Ramey in dealings with the DECD. His going to the advertising agency may also have some political undertones we'll discuss in a moment.
State Sen. John Hohrn (D-Jackson), himself a one-time staffer at DECD, and certainly no fan of Heidel, had started taking potshots at the Gibbes career switch and Heidel in passing, back in mid-summer. The lawmaker called it a prime case of the revolving door at work. Heidel answered that Gibbes had his own attorney look at it and found it OK.
Both Hohrn and Heidel had asked the state Ethics Commission for an advisory opinion, and the preliminary answer given by Ethics Director Ron Crowe seemed to give Gibbes the commission's green light. But a closer look at what Crowe had to say in the advisory opinion shows that it didn't exactly give Gibbes a clean bill, only that based on the initial facts presented, there appeared no conflict of interest.
However, Crowe said it was difficult to assess such revolving door situations after the fact. He went on to say that a state agency could best avoid such cases happening by writing prohibitions against them beforehand in the employment contract with the public servant. To totally prevent such circumstances as the Gibbes case, he added, "there must be some action by the state Legislature to pass a 'revolving door' law or laws."
Gibbes had been DECD's $62,760 communications director before taking the newly-created job as vice president for public affairs for Ramey. Ramey had contracts for most of DECD's $7 million advertising program, including some which Gibbes oversaw directly. The agency was also kept on a $1 million a year retainer.
Subsequently, Hohrn asked the legislative PEER committee to dig into the revolving door dilemma in Mississippi and make a report of its findings.
The watchdog agency is now setting about to do a full-blown probe whose scope Director Max Arinder says will cover the whole spectrum of job switching by public employees to companies they dealt with.
One outstanding, earlier PEER case in November, 1995 blasted Gregg Phillips, the recently departed Executive Director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, for taking a $7,000-a-month job with a specialized equipment company which had sold equipment to a job-training program created by DHS.
Phillips directly went to work for Synesis, then a division of Centec, the supplier of mobile learning laboratories used by LEAP, the ambitious job training program for welfare recipients.
Before he left DHS, Phillips had approved an $875,000 contract with Centec, which PEER said was a third of the company's entire net worth.
PEER had called on the Ethics Commission and the Attorney General to pursue possible violations of state ethics laws by Phillips, saying that his actions, in the least, violated the spirit and intent of the law.
Phillips' job with Synesis didn't last very long, and somehow he got off the hook for prosecution. However the PEER investigation did cost Phillips a job he wanted as Alabama's state human services head.
Meantime, with the help of Gov. Kirk Fordice, Phillips was made executive director of the state Republican Party, but he didn't last long there, getting booted by new GOP chairman Mike Retzer.
Hohrn and several of his Senate colleagues are already preparing proposed legislation to finally close the state's revolving door and are planning to use the expected PEER recommendations in their proposals.
In a related scenario to the Gibbes-to-Ramey episode, political speculation has it that DECD director Heidel is planning to run for governor as a Republican in 1999 and will hire the Ramey agency to handle his campaign.
Further goes the speculation, Gibbes will manage it.
Bill Minor is a columnist who covers Mississippi politics. He was a long-time reporter for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.