Shawn Vestal: Wisps of smoke, but no fire, in audit over homeless contracts

When she was running for mayor, Nadine Woodward received a $100 campaign contribution from the founder of The Guardians LLC.

Then, after her election, Woodward signed two contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to The Guardians to operate badly needed shelters for the homeless. These were emergency contracts, made to satisfy a pressing need for homeless services with a provider who was up to the task, and approved without City Council say-so.

Does this seem like a big deal to you?

A damning appearance of a quid pro quo?

Me neither. It seems, rather, like something that is typical given the way our campaigns operate. It seems, actually, like the kind of thing you might find for every elected official in the city, county and state.

But it is a more obvious and serious conflict of interest than those that Woodward helped to air this week with the release of an audit that – whatever its intentions – seemed to cast aspersions on her former election opponent, a former city official overseeing homeless services, and a nonprofit that does the lion’s share of the heavy lifting on homelessness in this city.

The mayor’s spokesman, Brian Coddington, said the audit was not meant to allege that there were conflicts of interest, but only to focus on areas of policy and procedure that might be improved; in response, the administration proposed a series of steps to do a better job of making sure procedures are followed, and potential conflicts – even tiny ones – are handled consistently. He said the intention was to avoid just the kind of political heat that resulted from former City Council President Ben Stuckart and others who felt that they’d been tarred.

But it’s understandable why they felt that way. Woodward’s administration asked the state to conduct the review a year ago, after hearing concerns from city staff about the awarding of an emergency contract for a warming center in November 2019.

The context of that moment could not be more important: Winter was arriving and the Condon administration had seemingly punted the issue. It was a completely unnecessary emergency caused by administrative incompetence or indifference – but it was definitely an emergency. Everyone involved was scrambling to get something done even as freezing temperatures arrived, and Jewels Helping Hands was awarded the contract to run the warming center.

The audit was released Monday. To say it caused more confusion than clarity would be an understatement.

Broadly speaking, the audit concluded that the city lacked financial controls and/or did not follow its financial controls in awarding the shelter contracts. It also asserted that there was an appearance of a conflict of interest on the part of Stuckart.

You would never be able to discern this from the audit or the way in which Woodward presented it, but the claim of a conflict in this example is thinner than onion skin.

It goes like this:

A) Stuckart received campaign contributions of $2,000 each from Don Barbieri and Sharon Smith.

B) Smith and Barbieri had years earlier endowed the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund, which contributed to various organizations in town.

C) The Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund supported Jewels Helping Hands financially. It did not stand to get any money back from any contract or other activity.

D) Therefore, when Stuckart “participated” in the process in which Jewels was given an emergency contract to run a warming shelter, he should have declared a conflict of interest. (The report passes along the claim, without further investigation, that Stuckart pressured the department to award the contract to Jewels and ignore contracting rules, which he denies. Also of note: A few months earlier, Stuckart voted to select a different provider over Jewels for a shelter proposal that fell apart.)

Here’s how Woodward summarized it in a news conference: “A former City Council member participated in a sub-recipient award process that included an organization whose founders contributed to the council member’s mayoral election campaign.”

Whether it was intentional or not, the whiff of a quid pro quo was pronounced.

City code prohibits officials and employees from having “an interest, financial or otherwise, direct or indirect, or (engaging) in a business or transaction of professional activity, or incur an obligation of any nature that might be seen as conflicting with the City officer or employee’s proper discharge of his or her official duties.”

The prohibition does not apply if the interest is “remote” and if it is disclosed in writing.

At the very most, you’d have to say Stuckart’s “conflict” here was as remote as Nome, so perhaps it should have been disclosed. It wasn’t. Neither was Woodward’s, which was considerably less remote.

But in what fantasy of government purity and disinterest and good government would you imagine that such a “conflict” is, or even appears to be, problematic? There is no question that financial influence is a problem in our politics, and no question that financial contributions to politicians tend to tether people with shared views and missions, and no question that interest groups spend on campaigns in the hope of obtaining specific ROIs from the politicians they support.

But the implications made in the audit, and the incompletely researched tale it presents, fall apart under the barest inspection. There is just no there there. As members of the City Council attempted to understand it – and its implications for a wildly expanded view of conflicts of interest in their own actions – they got no good answers along with some wrong ones.

The representative of the auditor’s office, asked by a confused City Council member as to what, exactly, was the nature of the supposed conflict that Stuckart gave the appearance of having, replied that it was because Smith or Barbieri sat on the board of Jewels Helping Hands.

Which is not true.

Worst of all, the auditors did not ask anyone whose actions were called into question about these complaints. To be fair, this was determined by the nature of the type of audit the city requested – a review of procedures and policies.

Still, the report raised implications auditors did not bother to confirm. They did not interview Stuckart. They did not interview Smith-Barbieri or Jewels. On a separate matter, auditors interviewed neither Kelly Keenan, the former head of the city department that oversees homeless projects, nor anyone with Catholic Charities – despite raising the specter that Keenan might have been inappropriately conflicted for taking a job at Catholic Charities after the organization had been awarded a contract to operate homeless services. Keenan has said he had no involvement in the contract.

The auditors simply interviewed a city staffer or staffers who believed that there had been conflicts, or might have been conflicts, or seemed as if there were conflicts – and went with that. Pressed as to why they had not dug into the facts just a wee bit more, the auditor’s spokeswoman told the City Council, “Our goal was to hear and understand what the staff believed was happening and understand their perspective.”

Job well done, then.

There’s too much influence and money in our politics. There’s too much horse-trading and favor-granting by people in power to those who put them there. All of that is true.

But the supposed conflicts raised in the audit – just as the conflict in the matter of the mayor and the Guardians contract – are nothing but a snipe hunt. Someone said they were out there, honest they did, but the harder you look, the more embarrassingly clear it becomes that they don’t actually exist.