FIRST REPORT SIDEBAR: Caucus policy of evasiveness alleged
2:04 PM 5/20/01
Dee J. Hall Wisconsin State Journal
Determining how much time legislative caucus employees spend on campaigns is difficult because of the bare-bones records they're required to keep and in part, some former staffers say, because they are told to cover their tracks.
Former employees interviewed by the State Journal said the campaign activity accelerated when the caucuses were moved out of the Capitol over a decade ago. And according to 11 former caucus staffers and internal documents obtained by the State Journal, caucus employees are instructed to act evasively when questions about campaigning arise.
Some recent examples:
Lyndee Wall, former executive assistant to the Assembly Republican Caucus, said she was told to hide the work she did for the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee (RACC), a private group that is supposed to be separate from the state-funded caucus. She also was given tips on how to cover it up.
"Whenever doing ANYTHING campaign related ... be vague and NEVER mention RACC or the word campaign or anything related," according to an informal job description Wall was given by her predecessor, Rhonda Drachenberg.
Drachenberg denied the caucuses have any campaign role and suggested that the hundreds of Assembly Republican Caucus documents the State Journal obtained from Wall and others might have been forged. She also denied writing the memo to Wall regarding her campaign duties.
Wall said she complied with the instructions to keep the campaigning a secret in order to keep her job. "I was a smart, driven, principled person," she said. "I knew I compromised myself - and I hate that."
On the day before the Nov. 7 election, a State Journal reporter asking for Senate Republican Caucus director Brian Fraley was told by an SRC employee that he had "stepped out for a minute." As she said that, Fraley called in from La Crosse, where he was working on the Dan Kapanke for Senate campaign.
Fraley later explained that he was on vacation to do the campaign work. He added that he always instructs his staff to take a message whenever anyone calls for him. "I apologize if we seemed evasive," he said.
Staffers also often use personal cell phones and private e-mail accounts to conduct campaign business while on the job, former employees say. And when strangers or non-partisan legislative employees enter the caucus offices, staffers often scramble to hide campaign-related documents, former employees say.
The State Journal filed a request under the Open Records Law in January to obtain all of the photos and graphics produced by the caucuses in 2000.
Wall, then the executive assistant of the Assembly Republican Caucus, said director Jason Kratochwill scrutinized with a "fine-tooth comb" the hundreds of electronic documents eventually turned over to exclude any campaign material, an action that would appear to violate the state's disclosure laws.
Nevertheless, the materials included three documents imprinted with campaign disclosures ("paid for by the campaign of") for three state representatives.
The state's record-keeping system also makes it tough to keep track of how much campaign activity goes on at the caucuses.
During campaign season, caucus employees often take vacation or unpaid leaves from their state jobs and slide directly onto the payroll of a privately funded legislative campaign committee or the state Republican or Democratic party - something that is perfectly legal to do. During leaves, state taxpayers continue to pick up the tab for health insurance and other benefits for the workers at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a year.
But some former caucus staffers said such leaves sometimes understate the true extent of employees' campaign activity.
Paul Uebelher, who worked at the Assembly Democratic Caucus on and off for 12 years until 1997, said staffers would take partial leaves from their state jobs "to create the appearance of propriety" while continuing to work virtually full time on campaigns.
The leaves are used to "muddy the waters," said Uebelher, now the outreach director for Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a leading advocate for campaign finance reform. "It was done to pass the smell test - just barely."
Tracking staffers' vacation time also is difficult. All legislative employees fill out time sheets that report how many hours of vacation or sick time they take each month - but not which days they're taken.
Assembly Chief Clerk John Scocos said he's working on some new personnel procedures, including more detailed time sheets, that would add accountability to the system.
Some former caucus staffers said the constant pressure to campaign and to do it surreptitiously makes it difficult to stay at the caucuses.
For Mike Patenaude, 10 years of sneaking around finally prompted him to quit the Assembly Democratic Caucus. Patenaude, who left in 1995, said he routinely campaigned on state time and using state resources.
"It's not the small 'd' democracy I was raised in," Patenaude said. "That's why I got ... out of there."