Colleges paid Davis aide’s salary

A former staffer for Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) was on the payroll of two community colleges in his district, one of which benefited from earmarks Davis requested.

When Gina Bailey McKell went to work for Davis’s district office in 2003, Shelton State Community College paid her $76,883 salary. That arrangement continued for roughly a year before another school in Davis’s district, Alabama Southern Community College, picked up the tab. Bailey McKell stayed on that payroll until she left Davis’s office in 2006.

{mosads}During Bailey McKell’s House tenure, Davis secured $510,000 in earmarks for Shelton State Community College, and $600,000 for Jefferson State Community College, another former employer of Bailey McKell.

In 2003, Davis won $100,000 for electronic and technical training at the college. The next year, while Bailey McKell was on his staff, he received $410,000 for Shelton State’s West Alabama Center for Workforce Development.

Davis, a top supporter of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) presidential campaign, did not ask the ethics committee about the propriety of the arrangement and told The Hill he saw nothing wrong with it. He noted that he requested $1.2 million in funding for Shelton State weeks before Bailey McKell came to work for him in May 2003.

“There was nothing mysterious or unusual about Gina’s placement in the office,” Davis insisted in an interview last week. “[The community colleges] were her ultimate employers, but I tried to treat her as a full-fledged member of the staff. She worked the normal week and then some.”

But ethics watchdogs argue that Davis’s use of a loaned staffer from two junior colleges is unusual and raises questions about whether he should have accepted such a generous gift from a state entity. They also wondered why both schools decided to underwrite her work for Davis.

“At the very least, this arrangement raises appearance problems,” said Meredith McGehee, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, “and the earmarks make them more serious.”

Bailey McKell had a similar arrangement when she worked for former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D); Jefferson State Community College paid her salary for more than two years.

After Siegelman lost his election and before she went to work for Davis, Bailey McKell’s salary transferred to Shelton State Community College and she remained in the governor’s office for a few months during GOP Gov. Bob Riley’s transition into office.

While in Siegelman’s office, Bailey McKell, a cousin of a close aide to the former governor, made no bones about her advocacy for the community college signing her paycheck. According to a report in The Birmingham News, McKell’s 2001 employee  evaluation at Jefferson State suggests that college officials expected her to use her position on Siegelman’s staff to steer dollars to the college.

“We have successfully applied and received funding and it is my goal to recruit any opportunity for programs and funding for Jefferson State,” the News reported that she wrote on an evaluation form.

Federal prosecutors have been investigating Alabama’s two-year college system for more than a year, and several people, including a former state lawmaker, have pleaded guilty to various charges, including nepotism in the awarding of contracts and jobs, and benefits contractors gave to the former chancellor of the community college system and his family.

Alabama media reports about the investigation have scrutinized Bailey McKell’s arrangement with Siegelman and Davis. She is the daughter of Jake Bailey, the former president of Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, Ala.

Davis said the earmarks had nothing to do with Bailey McKell’s role in his office and that the projects amounted to a fraction of the entire $80 million the Alabama delegation won for state universities and colleges between 2004 and 2006. Colleges in Davis’s district received a total of $3.5 million during the time frame in question, Davis asserts.

He also said Bailey McKell’s prior work for Siegelman has not influenced his opinion that the ex-governor’s 2006 conviction on federal funds bribery, conspiracy, honest services mail fraud and obstruction of justice was politically motivated and pursued by a partisan Justice Department.

The House Judiciary Committee, of which Davis is a member, is investigating the conviction as part of its ongoing probe into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys.

“That’s the point that some partisan Republicans in Alabama would like to make,” Davis said. “I decided last summer that the [Justice Department] didn’t have a strong record of responsibility, that three U.S. attorneys were pressured to bring certain kinds of cases based on partisanship.”

District staff members, including Bailey McKell, have nothing to do with appropriations requests, Davis said. Staffers who make those decisions are in Washington, D.C., and community colleges’ representatives regularly fly in to meet with their lobbyists and press their case on Capitol Hill, he said.

Davis explained that McKell served as a grant expert who created a listing of federal grant opportunities that was sent out via e-mail to a list of constituents. She also was involved in fundraising on his reelection campaign.

Bailey McKell received $24,000 from Davis’s campaign, and was reimbursed $2,300 for mileage from his congressional office allowance.

Shelton State Community College President Mark Heinrich said the Bailey McKell arrangement occurred before his time at the college and he could not say why the college paid her full salary to work for Siegelman and Davis.

Calls to the president of Alabama Southern Community College were not returned.

Members of Congress often have fellows working in their offices whose salaries are paid for by various federal government departments or agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the State Department and NASA.

According to the Members’ Handbook published by the House Administration Committee, a fellow must be working on “a temporary basis as part of an established mid-career education program while continuing to receive the usual compensation from his or her sponsoring employer.”

The watchdogs, however, say they have never heard of a local community college sharing or loaning its employee to a member of Congress.

The handbook specifically notes that the use of fellows is subject to House ethics committee regulations, and that members should contact the panel with any questions.

“The issue is whether the volunteer or the shared employee rules as outlined in the manual are being complied with,” said Stan Brand, a Democratic ethics expert. “Whether an outside group is allowed to subsidize a House employee … If it’s not apparent from the way it’s structured under the rules, then one would assume you would ask the [ethics] committee.”

Davis said he never consulted the ethics committee to get its approval because his staff studied the ethics rules themselves and found what they believed was wide latitude in regards to accepting in-kind services from state government entities.

His aides pointed to a gifts provision in the ethics manual that states that members may accept “anything that is paid for by the Federal Government, by a State or local government, or secured by the Government under a Government contract …”

“This is a broad provision, which extends to tangible items of all kinds, as well as meals, services, and travel provided, however, that the gift is paid for by a government agency or entity,” the manual reads.

“That gave me comfort that it was perfectly permissible,” Davis said. “And she had a similar arrangement for the last two governors of Alabama.”

The Campaign Legal Center’s McGehee disagrees. She said full-time staffers cannot be equated to “services” and the fellowship programs she’s aware of only loaned federal government employees to Congress.