By John Brummett
I run into people from all walks of Arkansas life who complain about this $324,000 salary for Ernie Passailaigue of South Carolina to construct and run our lottery.
This all can be distilled to a basic conversation:
Q: How can we justify the misplaced priority of spending this much of our hard-earned tax money for this job when we have a governor and an education director and college presidents who get much less?
A: Actually, the lottery is set up as a quasi-independent public corporation that will pay for itself through the revenue it generates, meaning dollars we choose to expend on a chance to win a lottery, not tax money we have no choice but to fork over.
Q: Well, OK, then, but wouldn’t that mean this money could better go for the purpose we intended when we voted, meaning college scholarships?
A: If we had hired a lottery director for, say, $180,000, we probably would not have netted $144,000 more for scholarships. Lottery people say we’d have had to hire outside consultants to help us get started, if, that is, we’d hired someone without start-up lottery experience. Those consultants would have cost more than $144,000.
They say we stand a chance to have a more successful lottery with Passailaigue, who, actually, has the rather brazen notion that he could get this thing up and running by November, at least two months earlier than anyone had been thinking.
If our lottery netted $150 million for scholarships when we’d been comfortably forecasting only $65 million, would that $85 million manna make you less huffy about that marginal $144,000 we expended on Passailaigue? Ever heard of being penny wise and pound foolish?
By the way, if he doesn’t produce, we’ll know instantly and we can fire him forthwith or cut his pay. Seldom have we had the chance to measure productivity this expeditiously and empirically.
Q: Why, then, if this pay is based on what we expect of his performance, didn’t we offer him a lower base salary with the rest in performance bonuses actually tied to what he can do?
A: You’re on to a little something there.
There was a bit of uncertainty about whether that was expressly permitted by statute. The Legislature’s appropriation had provided a range‚ a line item of $140,000 or so with a provision that, for “recruitment and retention,” the commission could pay two-and-a-half times that. Presumably that difference could have been tied to a performance bonus.
But that was rendered moot by the fact that Passailaigue named his price in the form he wanted it and the Lottery Commission wanted him too much — finding him entirely too ideal — to demur.
Q: Isn’t this cronyism, this idea of Passailaigue’s to bring a couple of his pals from South Carolina at maybe $200,000 per?
A: One man’s cronyism is another man’s building a team he trusts. Bobby Petrino brought in his own brother as a top assistant coach.
Q: But the process — it was bad, wasn’t it? They took all these applications in public. Then they met in secret. Next thing we know, they’re paying $324,000 to a guy who didn’t even apply, and he’s some good ol’ boy who’d been advising them from the start in private. Doesn’t that stink?
A: Oh, it carries a faint odor, perhaps. But consider: The day after applications closed, Lottery Commission Chairman Ray Thornton candidly declared in public that he was disappointed in the quality.
They probably were going to have no process at all, actually, if Tom Courtway had stayed in the running; the commissioners were going to pick him.
So they went out and paid the price to nab the guy they really liked, both personally and on account of his having done this very job successfully in a state much like ours and being well-respected and well-wired and well-perched in the lottery fraternity.
Process can be overrated. Product matters more. Don’t tell me about digging in the dirt. Show me the flowers.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
