Florida Chapter Regier's nonsense:
DCF chief's records seized
Fri, Jul. 09, 2004
Investigators from Gov. Jeb Bush's inspector general's office have confiscated the contents of the work computer of Department of Children & Families Secretary Jerry Regier as part of an investigation into how the agency awards contracts.
When Gov. Jeb Bush was asked Thursday if the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, a statewide law enforcement agency, was investigating Jerry Regier, Bush responded: ``Not that I'm aware of.''
Last week, The Herald reported that DCF had awarded a $21 million contract to upgrade the state's troubled child welfare computer system to a company whose board of directors included former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating -- the man who recommended Regier to the governor.
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Sooner or later, sun had to shine on Regier deals
July 25, 2004
We're not in Oklahoma anymore, Toto.
Back home, questionable deals brokered by Jerry Regier's state agency received scant attention from notoriously languid press. He left Oklahoma two years ago, with his rep intact.
But questionable deals are regarded a bit differently in Florida than in Oklahoma City, home of The Daily Oklahoman, the state's dominant newspaper, crowned ''The Worst Paper in America'' in 1999 by the Columbia Journalism Review.
An occasional critical quote from a Democratic politician might get published in Oklahoma, but Regier, who headed the Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs and, later, served as secretary of health and human services, faced little in the way of tough, independent reporting.
TOUGHER COVERAGE
Florida, however, hasn't exactly been a Caribbean cruise, a weekend at Disney World or a day at the beach. (In fact, his birthday bash at a contractor's Longboat Key beach house last fall became the stuff of scandal.)
As the inspector general report indicates, Regier has found
friends in many of the wrong places. Jim Bax may be the former head of
the agency that predated DCF, but he also represents companies that
landed 28 DCF contracts. Why else would Bax host a birthday party for
Regier and invite him to spend the night in Bax's $3-million Longboat
Key home? Why would lobbyist Don Yaeger help Regier find concert
tickets? Why would lobbyist Greg Coler bring him a bottle of wine?
Consider Jerry's recent exposure in the media sunshine. In the past three weeks, he has been pummeled with one revelation after another of ethical lapses and questionable deals and no-bid contracts and sleight-of-hand schemes.
His dismal run has included a series of competing stories in The Herald, The Palm Beach Post, The Sun-Sentinel, The St. Pete Times, The Tallahassee Democrat, The Orlando Sentinel. The papers have all found variations on sleazy doings by the hierarchy of the Department of Children & Families, telling of private vendors favored by Regier and his staff, getting access and sweetheart deals without having to deal with the inconvenience of competing bids. And these accounts have come with killer details about the contractors showering Regier and his top assistants with some very nice trips and casino outings and concert tickets and that swell beach party on Long Boat Key.
Consider a few of the headlines Regier and staff have inspired in state newspapers during his July heat wave:
Regier Ex-Aide Won Deal With DCF Help.
Double Standard at DCF When It Comes to Ethics.
Regier Used Lobbyists To Get Tickets.
At DCF, Push for Privatization has Degenerated into Cronyism.
Regier's Final Chance.
State Says DCF Chief, Others Violated Ethics.
Two Resign After Scrutiny of Gifts, DCF Chief Implicated.
Investigation Reveals Gifts Were Accepted From Vendors.
Regier Apologizes For Ethical Lapses.
DCF Chief's Records Seized.
DCF Investigation Reaches Into DCF Chief's Computer.
Another Free Trip At DCF.
Bush Says Paid Trips Are Inappropriate.
A STUNNING CHANGE
Regier must be stunned by the change in the media climate. ''I imagine he was quite surprised,'' said a former editor at The Daily Oklahoman.
The same sort of deals that fueled a scandal in Florida hardly stirred the press in Oklahoma. ''That's a great understatement,'' said Kevin Easley. The former state senator from Broken Arrow told me Thursday how he had tried, without much success, to get reporters to look into the $1.2 million in no-bid contracts Regier awarded to a former Republican political consultant, Mary Myrick, including a $400,000 deal to run the state's controversial marriage initiative, the project supposed to keep Oklahoma marriages intact.
''She wasn't qualified,'' Easley said. ''She wasn't even married.'' She did, however, list her friend Jerry as a reference on her résumé.
Regier's regime has been criticized by Oklahoma's state auditor for using other state agencies to circumvent competitive bid requirements -- just as his department has used Florida State University to avoid Florida's bid laws.
No big deal back there in middle America. But I don't think we're in Oklahoma anymore, Toto.
still, Jeb Bush stuck up for him.
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What part of the ethics rules does DCF's Regier not understand?
By MARY JO MELONE, Times Staff Writer
Published August 9, 2004
The trouble with the story unraveling about Jerry Regier, the secretary of the Department of Children and Families, is that it just reinforces the public view of the agency. This is unfair. It has nothing to do with the hundreds of people who, in the agency's name, do a good job caring for the state's vulnerable children and adults.
Nevertheless, anybody who hears what Regier has been up to can be forgiven for saying here we go again. But we are not, thankfully, talking about another dead child. It's just a case of a clueless bureaucrat.
There were the tickets he bought for concerts and the Daytona 500 from lobbyists who represented companies doing DCF business. A birthday party for him from a man whose company did millions in DCF business, and a night in that man's Longboat Key house. Three instances, according to DCF staffers, in which the agency managed to go the extra mile to make sure contracts went to old Regier associates.
In addition, two top Regier aides quit when a report disclosed that they'd taken free trips and gifts from companies doing business with DCF.
Samara Kramer, another Regier deputy, is the hero of this sorry tale. Last March, when she warned Regier that some of his staff might be doing things that suggested the appearance of impropriety, he fired her, Kramer said. Regier has since said he didn't mean to fire her. But he did rehire her. Go figure.
Right about now in this column, I should be telling you that Regier has come to his senses and regrets what has gone wrong. Well, I can and I can't. For Regier has said both. First, he declared that he had apologized directly to the governor. Then Regier sent a couple of memos to his staff which struck a different tone.
In a brief one, on July 9, Regier sounded like the front-office cheerleader. He talked about needing to be enthusiastic. He told his employees to "stay positive and focus on our mission" - as though they somehow had a role to play in his travails.
Then on July 30, he issued another memo, this one two pages long. In it, Regier all but declared they're-out-to-get-me.
"The newspaper articles contain terrible distortions of the truth," he wrote. "Even when all the available facts are given to some reporters, they choose to print only information that supports the innuendo.
"I want to state unequivocally that I have not done something wrong either with gifts or with contracting."
Then he told everybody to have a nice weekend. This must have been his effort to boost the staff's morale at this difficult time.
No surprise here: The governor is standing by his man, and that's all that matters. Bush hires department secretaries in agencies like DCF, and he can fire them too.
Still, a chorus is rising against Regier, and it's coming from the Legislature. It would be one thing if the critics were just Democrats. You'd expect that. And it wouldn't make a difference to the fate of Jerry Regier.
But one of the critics is a Republican, Tampa's Sandy Murman. She is chairman of the Human Services Appropriations Committee in the Senate. What she says counts.
Murman acknowledged that there's been talk that Regier ought to quit. She wouldn't go that far. But she had nothing good to say about Regier taking things from DCF contractors - even if he paid for them - because it didn't look right.
"There's no gray area," she said.
"When you take things from people, you have to ask yourself if it's the right thing to do."
Jerry Regier has had trouble grasping that concept. In that memo from last month, he complained that "the rules of ethical contact with lobbyists and vendors had "changed' over the past several weeks" - as though he was being singled out suddenly and it wasn't fair.
Then Regier offered this noble-sounding promise. "I am making it my policy to have no contact with lobbyists or vendors until the issues of payment and appearances are clarified," he said.
Oh, good. Now he can find some real work to do
In May, "Grace University" gave the toad an honorary doctorate -- citing his
contributions to the country and Christian community.
Doctor of Crookedness perhaps?
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DCF under fire; why won't Jeb Bush fire this man?
16 Aug 2004
Carl Hiaasen Miami Herald HeraldEd@aol.com
Jerry Regier has obviously got Polaroids of Gov. Jeb Bush in drag, or an equally kinky secret.
Nothing else could explain why Bush hasn't fired this knucklehead from the Department of Children and Families, where Regier has served two damaging years as secretary.
Arguably the most important appointment of the governor's tenure -- choosing the person to lead Florida's scandalized child-welfare agency -- has proved to be one of the worst decisions Bush has ever made.
A scalding report by the governor's chief inspector general has revealed that high-ranking DCF officials handed out fat and dubious contracts to pals and political cronies, and accepted gifts, favors and lodging from outside contractors.
As a result, three of Regier's top administrators have quit, and Regier himself has been reduced to defending his own outrageous socializing with a DCF contractor.
It's much more than the mere "appearance of impropriety." It is the greedy, rotten essence of impropriety -- profiteering at the expense of Florida's neediest and most vulnerable children.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have been spent hiring more caseworkers and investigators were instead doled out to well-connected firms as part of Regier's rush to "privatize" child-welfare services.
In recent weeks, the Miami Herald's Carol Marbin Miller has documented the DCF gravy train in infuriating detail. A few of the lowlights:
--A $21 million contract to fix DCF's computer system was awarded to American Management Services, although another company had been ranked first after the initial screening process.
The lobbyist for American Management happened to be Greg Coler, a former chief of the state child-welfare agency and a close friend of Regier. Sitting on American Management's board of directors was former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating -- the man who recommended Regier for the DCF job in Florida.
--DCF Deputy Secretary Ben Harris gave out a $500,000 no-bid contract, split between two of his friends, for computer ‘‘kiosks'' that dispense food stamps.
Harris brushed off warnings that the kiosks were a dumb idea because food-stamp recipients couldn't master the technology and wouldn't use them, and because the equipment was often unreliable.
After being singled out by the inspector general, Harris and another Regier lackey resigned from DCF.
--Regier attended a birthday party thrown for him by a buddy named Jim Bax, who was director of Florida State University's Institute for Health and Human Services. During another visit, Regier and his wife spent the night at Bax's luxury home on Longboat Key.
At the time, Bax's firm had been awarded more than $4 million in contract work from DCF.
Regier also accepted tickets for concerts and sports events from lobbyists for private vendors dealing with DCF. He says he repaid them out of his pocket.
Naturally, the secretary insists he did nothing wrong and admits only to a lapse in judgment. Whether he made that statement in blind stupidity or common arrogance doesn't really matter -- the man is patently unfit to be running any state agency, much less the one in charge of protecting Florida's kids. Who, by the way, are still being abused, abandoned and killed in appalling numbers.
When aides warned Regier of ethical problems with the way DCF was dishing out contracts, he ignored them. His chief of staff, Samara Kramer, persisted -- and was canned for disloyalty.
Regier quickly hired her back, then denied ever firing her -- a blatant lie that is hardly out of character.
Back in early 2003, he ordered the dismissal of six DCF employees in Hialeah for allegedly rudely treating the grandmother of an influential state senator.
Regier denied firing the workers and cowardly blamed a local supervisor. E-mails later confirmed that the supervisor had supported the workers, and that it was Regier who personally ordered them fired.
How could Bush not have seen this mess coming? Regier was a GOP party hack in Oklahoma with an undistinguished track record in the family services bureaucracy. An ultraconservative Christian, his byline had turned up on two published papers that espoused spanking kids, even if it caused "welts and bruises."
Typically, Regier tried to weasel out of his own words by claiming he didn't agree with those controversial sections of the articles, even though he'd plastered his name on them.
Then, last summer, while supposedly devoting full time to saving our endangered kids, Regier signed up as co-campaign chairman for a Republican Senate candidate -- back in Oklahoma.
Bush was miffed, but he still didn't ax the guy. And here we are a year later, swamped with scandal at an agency that can ill-afford more demoralizing, an agency that Bush has repeatedly promised to clean up and fix.
I don't care if Regier has snapshots of Jeb dolled up like Liza Minelli, the governor had better get rid of this goober before a grand jury forces him to do it.
"I plan to stay and lead this agency," Regier insisted the other day. If that happens, God help the suffering children of Florida.
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August 17, 2004
A disabled Floridian was put atop a 15,500-person waiting list and offered services after a Department of Children & Families supervisor and House Speaker Johnnie Byrd's office pressured agency officials, a newspaper reported Monday.
The community-based services were created to help people with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, autism and other genetic disorders. The money that is supposed to service the people on the waiting list comes from federal Medicaid dollars. In the late 1990s, Florida eliminated a waiting list for community-based services by offering services to the more than 20,000 Floridians on the list, but a new list has developed, containing 15,548 names -- an embarrassment for DCF Secretary Jerry Regier and Bush, who campaigned in part on a promise to improve the lives of disabled people. Four of Regier's top aides have resigned in the past two months (misdeeds involving money). Regier, however, has held onto his job with Bush's support.
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