A Haines Borough Assembly member on Tuesday made a move to terminate Bill Thomas’s lobbyist contract, but other members weren’t on board with the plan.
Assembly member Ron Jackson wanted to direct interim manager Brad Ryan to work with the borough attorney to clarify the $45,000 contract’s termination clause and, if possible, end the contract effective June 30.
The assembly voted 5-1 on Jackson’s motion, with only Jackson in favor. The contract has caused considerable confusion for its vague scope of work and time frame.
Though it expires Dec. 31, Thomas said his understanding was the $45,000 primarily covered the 90-day legislative session. He said he is willing to do other miscellaneous work, like show U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski around when she comes to town for the 24th Annual Great Alaska Craft Beer and Homebrew Festival.
“I value getting paid for work done, and what I see is the work is already done and we’re going to continue paying the rest of the year. And I don’t think that is responsible to our budgets or to the people paying for that,” Jackson said.
Thomas chose to have the annual contract paid out in installments instead of a lump sum, and he has collected $22,500 so far. Interim manager Ryan said he doesn’t believe that means if the contract were terminated the borough wouldn’t have to pay Thomas the remaining $22,500.
“I think (Thomas) could request the entire payment right now if he wanted and we would be obligated to pay it,” Ryan said.
Assembly member Margaret Friedenauer said strife is occurring because of a“crappy” contract. Friendenauer spoke with Ray Gillespie, lobbyist for the Alaska Municipal League, to dig into how lobbyist contracts are drawn up.
Gillespie told Friedenauer the scope of services in lobbyist contracts “should be as specific as possible.”
“Do you want this person to get paid $45,000 over 12 months for only a session? Then that’s what your contract should say. Or if you’re expecting them to work on retainer throughout the year for when things come up, then it should say that. And that’s when I realized what the problem was. That’s what we didn’t have in this contract,” Friedenauer said.
Friedenauer became visibly frustrated during the discussion, because she felt people were misinterpreting her concern about a poorly written contract as an attack on Thomas.
“It’s not easy to ask questions about these things and to have it perceived as you’re attacking an individual, which I’m definitely not doing. And I don’t think it’s wrong to say that we have a crappy contract and it’s okay to ask about a termination clause that is in the contract that both parties know is there,” she said.
Assembly member George Campbell said he was “extremely disappointed” with Jackson’s motion, saying it was in “very bad form.”
“It’s without honor to try and now figure out a way to squeeze someone out of the rest of their contract after they’ve done the work. We all knew that the session is the main part where we wanted someone,” Campbell said.
“This is one of the reasons why it’s very difficult to get people to come and work for Haines and work in Haines, because nobody can depend on anything,” Campbell said.
Assembly member Diana Lapham echoed Campbell, saying even if Thomas were out commercial fishing this summer, he would still be “keeping that watchful eye out” for Haines-related issues.
“This contract, I’m looking at it as a learning curve,” Lapham said. “We didn’t know what we don’t know when we went into this. Now we have hindsight tells us a lot of information. The next time that we negotiate this contract, we’re going to have a lot more information.”
Assembly member Mike Case agreed the contract “leaves much to be desired,” but said he wanted to retain Thomas’ services for the rest of the year. “It may be that he will go two months and there’s not one usable thing in the two months, but he’s there and he’s keeping his finger on the pulse of things,” Case said.
Mayor Jan Hill said Thomas has offered to do federal lobbying for the borough, and will work with incoming manager William Seward to bring him up to speed on legislative issues.