Should taxpayer funds be used to pay contract lobbyists for state agencies and public universities?

The state Senate Ethics Committee will explore that question today during hearings in Room 216 at the state Capitol beginning at 9 a.m. as College Board president Amy Whitten and former higher education commissioner Tom Meredith testify along with the heads of seven state agencies.

Senate Ethics Committee chairman Sen. Merle Flowers, R-Southaven, and Sen. David Baria, D-Bay St. Louis, who chairs the subcommittee on Government Accountability, organized the hearings.

Flowers’ committee issued subpoenas to Whitten and Meredith. Whitten said Tuesday that she will appear before the committee and that she believed Meredith would appear as well, but pointed out that Meredith’s resignation as commissioner was effective Nov. 15 and that the College Board has no power to compel Meredith to comply. The hearings are open to the public.

Flowers said the committee has been investigating state agencies and universities allegedly using over $1.2 million taxpayer funds to hire contract lobbyists during a five-year period.

A report by the Joint Legislative Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee (PEER) is at the root of these hearing. In that report, PEER says six state agencies and three universities, including Delta State, Mississippi State and Ole Miss, used state funds to hire lobbyists.

PEER says that DSU spent $36,085 hiring lobbyist Hayes Dent, Ole Miss spent $7,500 hiring lobbyist Crowell Armstrong and that Mississippi State University spent $297,807 dollars hiring lobbyist Camille Scales Young, who is affiliated with the Watkins, Ludlum and Stennis law firm in Jackson over a five-year period from Fiscal Year 2003 to FY 2007

In addition, the PEER report concluded that taxpayer funds were used when the Gulf Coast Coliseum and Convention Center paid lobbyist Stan Flint $33,999, the Mississippi Department of Transportation paid lobbyist George P. Smith $363,769, Mississippi Industries for the Blind paid lobbyist Beth Clay $123,052, the State Port Authority paid lobbyist Scott Leavenway $139,585, the Governor’s Office Division of Medicaid paid lobbyist Suzanne Sharpe $14,400 and the Pearl River Water Supply District paid Bradford J. Dye $277,386 — all over the same five-year period from 2003 to 2007.

Flowers said the Miss. Technology Alliance was not cited in the PEER report, but had made lobbying expenditures.

Whitten said that some of the universities have suggested that PEER overstated the expenditures. Privately, lobbyists and IHL representatives have disputed the report and claim that the Flowers probe has political motivations. Some of Flowers’ fellow state legislators are also expressing concern over the hearings.

But Flowers said the university and state agency representatives could speak to those concerns in front of the public. “I’m concerned at a time when we’re having to cut budget in essential services that taxpayer money is being used to pay lobbyists by institutions and agencies that obviously can get the attention of the Legislature on their own,” said Flowers. “We could save the state at least $350,000 a year by stopping this practice.”

State law expressly prohibits public universities from using taxpayer funds for lobbying purposes. While state agencies aren’t expressly prohibited from spending taxpayers funds on lobbyists, the practice has raised the ire of some lawmakers.

There appears no partisan bend to these hearings. Republican and Democratic politicians alike will be uncomfortable, as will lobbyists popular with both parties.

Important public policy hearing or political circus? We’ll see.