Guadagno's amateur hour at budget hearing
Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno is starring in a new show: Amateur Hour in Trenton. There’s no other way to describe her performance before the Senate budget committee on Monday, which left committee members baffled.
“It was a very, very bizarre hearing,” said committee chairman Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen). Very.
For months, Guadagno has lambasted the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, citing an incomplete state audit that allegedly found three contracts — totaling $300,000 for public art projects — went to one organization without proper authorization. Guadagno said a state attorney or the arts council board of trustees should have signed off on them. She called for Steve Runk, the executive director, to resign; he’ll leave this summer.
But as The Star-Ledger’s Peggy McGlone reported, Guadagno’s chief financial officer signed off on the controversial contracts with Co-Works, Inc., a Hamilton nonprofit. And as recently as February, the financial officer reminded the arts council in a memo that purchasing requests must be submitted to him for “review and processing.”
Guadagno may not have the power to fire arts council staffers, but when it comes to these contracts, the buck clearly stops at her door. The Senate committee pressed Guadagno about her department’s responsibility for greenlighting the contracts. “People in my shop were disciplined” for not following procedures, she replied, but refused to say definitively that one of her staffers had, in fact, signed all the contracts, and couldn’t describe their process for ensuring state regulations are followed.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2011/05/guadagnos_amateur_hour_at_budg.html