Rep. Thomas Wright, D-New Hanover, call your office.
I mean, really, call your office. After I previously wrote about the conflict-of-interest posed by your position as co-chair of the House Appropriations Committee and your position on the board of a Wilmington nonprofit you hoped to get funded with state dollars, you called my office in Raleigh. Presumably you meant to clarify the situation, offer an explanation, quibble with my characterization, dump on the news reporter involved, or otherwise defend yourself.
This would have been a splendid idea. But repeated return calls to the number you left me generated nothing. I noted with interest that the Wilmington newspaper that uncovered the previous story was also having trouble getting up with you, so I didn’t feel slighted. You were obviously going through a rough patch.
Unfortunately, the rough patch has now grown into a thicket. Pat Stith, the indomitable investigative reporter for The News & Observer of Raleigh, wrote a major front-page piece on Sunday that examined an alleged agreement between the state Department of Health and Human Services and a number of pharmaceutical companies opposed to an HHS initiative to reduce the growth of Medicaid spending on drugs. The Easley administration stopped pursuing its cost-saving measures, and shortly afterward the companies began to make contributions to a nonprofit foundation associated with HHS.
I don’t yet know what to think about the central element of this story, but what did leap out at me was the sidebar, which concerned how some of those millions of dollars in the North Carolina Foundation for Advanced Health Programs had been spent. Apparently, it was spent employing you, Rep. Wright, as a “health and safety consultant.” It seems obvious to me that various flags, flashers, and alarm bells should have gone off here, but did not. Indeed, somewhat implausibly, you told the N&O that not only was there no conflict of interest but also that you weren’t aware of the foundation’s connect to state government at all — even though you knew it was headed by an assistant HHS secretary and housed at the HHS Rural Health Office, and even though you were, at the time, a member of the appropriations subcommittee on health and human services.
As previously stated, the cavalier attitude with which many state legislators and administration officials continue to approach problematic state funding for local, politically connected nonprofits is baffling. Former state senator and now U.S. Rep., Frank Ballance has gotten himself into serious trouble for similar misjudgments. Surely, by now, there are few excuses for a prominent state official not to recognize the sensitivity of this issue and the importance of playing it safe and straight.
Some might argue that your case demonstrates how hard it is to make a living in some professions while trying to serve in public office, and thus the General Assembly ought to be a full-time job. OK, I have no problem debating that issue. But the fact is that for now we have an officially part-time legislature, one that should be made up of North Carolinians who aren’t simultaneously trying to secure state contracts or score state dollars to pay their bills. The potential for a conflict of interest is inescapable.
Rep. Wright, if you find it impossible to ply your trade without doing business with an arm of one of state government’s largest and most important agencies, then you need to make a choice. There is no inalienable right to hold public office.
And if I’m missing something here, please don’t hesitate to call.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.