JACKSON - Memo to the 2008 Mississippi Legislature: keep your cotton-pickin' hands off the Legislative PEER committee.
In 34 years of existence, PEER's staff has managed to do its job with relatively little political interference from the 14 lawmakers on the committee. But the onset of a sharp partisan divide in the Legislature has raised fears that partisanship could invade PEER.
It's obligatory, of course, to explain the PEER stands for the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review. Thankfully rather than that jaw-breaker title, it has been known as PEER.
What focused my attention to look back on some of the great work PEER has done was last week when the joint legislative watchdog group issued its 500th formal report. Though not about a particularly sexy subject - legal status of university foundations - the report was a landmark for the number it bore.
Over the years since it was created in 1973 - replacing the old General Legislative Investigating Committee that lacked full-time staff and powers to oversee performance of public agencies - PEER has become a valuable investigative arm for legislative crackdown on mismanagement of public funds.
PEER's findings have helped send some highly placed governmental figures to jail - among them powerful State Sen. Bill Burgin and state Highway Director E. L. Boteler - and to tighten loopholes in laws that had invited chicanery.
Though the law creating PEER gave it power to employ attorneys to prosecute criminal or civil wrongdoing in cases it finds, PEER has always turned over its evidence to the attorney general to pursue.
Perhaps even more important, PEER has provided the Legislature the blueprints to bring about long overdue governmental reform.
Thanks to PEER's spadework, the Legislature in 1980 reduced the myriad 120 state boards and commissions to a manageable 20 or so. Former state Sen. Robert Crook of Ruleville pushed the huge reorganization bill through the Legislature, saving the state millions of dollars.
In 1981, PEER uncovered a long-standing practice in the state Department of Education of allowing the then-elective superintendent of education, along with certain other officials, to sell the dozens of sample textbooks provided by book publishers and pocket the money.
PEER's findings stopped the textbook racket and resulted in major Education Department reforms that led to creation of an appointive State Board of Education to select a highly professional state superintendent of education.
In 1983, PEER did a full-scale review of the Department of Audit and found it 581 years (yes, years) behind in the audits of state and local governmental bodies. Cardboard boxes full of audit material, including $331,000 in cash from audit fees, were found in the agency's hallways.
Needless to say, that year the Audit Department was reformed, and Ray Mabus, a Harvard grad and one of Gov. William Winter's "boys of summer" staffers, was elected state auditor on a vigorous reform platform.
Probably the key to PEER's ability to keep out of a lethal political crossfire is how Max Arinder, the committee's executive director since 1996, describes its role: "We don't do politics. If we are asked to do a study, we do policy, not politics."
Arinder has maintained a low visibility around the Legislature, far less in fact than his predecessor, John Turcotte, who held the job for 17 years and caught heavy flak from some of the most powerful legislative figures when he stepped on their toes.
Turcotte left Mississippi's PEER in 1996 to become director of a far bigger legislative oversight agency in Florida (a job wiped out by Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002 in an executive coup) and recently became director of a new PEER-style agency created in North Carolina.
At age 29, Turcotte went to work for PEER in 1974. His digging into financial dealings of state Highway Director E.L. Boteler, the highly respected former state legislator, in 1976 found some $60,000 in road funds were missing. Turcotte told it to a Hinds County grand jury, and Boteler became the first state official convicted of embezzling public funds.
Already in hot water with Sen. Burgin over PEER'S investigation of the notorious 16th Section school land leases, Turcotte's team risked the agency's demolition at the hands of the powerful Senate Finance chairman by helping the FBI dig into Burgin's shady role in a $4 million federal-state educational training contract.
PEER investigator Michael Ratchford testified against Burgin in a federal trial that saw Burgin convicted of taking $450,000 in kickbacks. "We were nervous that if Burgin weren't convicted, he'd return as Senate Finance chairman and PEER would be dead," Turcotte remembers.
