Monday, May 14, 2012

What about the boss?

News is breaking about the Chief of Staff of the Florida Governor, Steve MacNamara, who is resigning after getting caught steering no-bid contracts to friends.


In the Senate, MacNamara steered a $5.5 million contract with Spider Data Systems for a software platform to improve public access to state budgets. The developer of the patented system, Anna Mattson, was a partner of lobbyist Jim Eaton, also a close friend of MacNamara’s. He also handed over a project to shift the Senate’s computer system from mainframe computers to another longtime acquaintance, Abe Uccello, at a cost of $380,000.
In the governor’s office, MacNamara overruled an agency head and allowed the film commissioner, whom he previously had helped get a job in the state Senate, to travel to the Sundance film festival. He was also accused of attempting to influence contracting outcomes and a controversial decision to allow barrel racing to be considered a parimutuel sport.
On Thursday, an ethics complaint filed against MacNamara accused him of using his staff time and state e-mail to apply for a job at a Catholic liberal arts college in Montana, where he had hoped to move after leaving the governor’s office. Public-records requests by The Herald/Times made to the governor’s office omitted the letter from MacNamara’s state e-mail account to the woman heading the presidential search effort for Carroll College in Helena.

And yet, the Governor himself previously ran a medical company tagged with the largest fine for Medicare fraud in American history, and once in office, signed legislation that steered State drug tests on poor folk to his wife's drug testing company.

What is wrong with these people?

3 comments:

Oldfart said...

I'll have to ask my Republican sister who lives in Jacksonville.

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