No doubt: LePage did it, but what else has he done?

Gov. Paul LePage speaks with reporters outside a Portland press conference on June 3. Troy R. Bennett | BDN

Gov. Paul LePage speaks with reporters outside a Portland press conference on June 3. Troy R. Bennett | BDN

Gov. Paul LePage did it.

He used his power as governor to ensure that Speaker of the House Mark Eves was fired from a position as president of Good Will-Hinckley.

Despite the fact that the governor and his senior staff refused to speak with investigators, the fact-finding report from the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability is clear and convincing.

The governor threatened to withhold hundreds of thousands of dollars from a charter school that serves at-risk youth because he personally disliked the person hired to lead the organization and was angered by his hiring.

Then, acting upon his threat or in response to it, the commissioner of education stopped a payment to the school.

The actions and the threat — to withhold $530,000 a year from the school — put at risk a much larger amount of money from Harold Alfond Foundation. The possibility of losing $2.75 million from the foundation, on top of the loss of $530,000 a year, was too much for the board of Good Will-Hinckley to endure.

Less than a month after announcing that it had hired Eves, Good Will-Hinckley fired him.

As the OPEGA report found, the Good Will-Hinckley board, worried about the loss of funding, made the decision to fire Eves with the understanding that state funding — and thus the foundation grant — would be restored.

After Eves was fired, the Department of Education re-committed to provide the $530,000 in funding for both 2016 and 2017.

Since this all transpired in June, Eves has sued the governor on a number of grounds, including that LePage has “engaged in blackmail to get Speaker Eves fired without cause.”

Eves’ attorney David Webbert says the report confirms that charge, and it’s hard to argue with that conclusion.

The lawsuit against the LePage is in the early stages, and the governor and his staff used the litigation as an excuse not to participate in the OPEGA investigation.

But his previous public comments left little doubt about what OPEGA would find. The governor was quick to attack Eves and his hiring, and made clear that funding for the school was at risk. He admitted as much publicly.

It’s not the first time he’s done this. He pulled the same trick with the president of Maine’s community college system, forcing out one of the most respected educational leaders in the state by threatening to punish his schools and their students.

OPEGA’s charge was not to determine whether the governor broke any laws or to assess wrongdoing. Instead, the office was unanimously charged with the task of fact finding by both Republicans and Democrats on the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee.

Now, the facts have been presented, and it’s up to Legislature to decide what comes next.

Majority Leader Jeff McCabe put it this way: “The report clearly shows that [LePage] is willing to damage Good Will-Hinckley to exact his personal revenge. If we allow this, is any public servant — and Maine person — safe from this kind of abuse of power?”

While the Government Oversight process will continue in October, when the committee has a chance to interview witnesses, it seems clear that the governor abused his authority as a way to punish a political rival.

He’s done it before with the community colleges. And there are allegations he also targeted the president of the World Acadian Congress in Aroostook County, who was also fired, some say, after intervention by LePage.

The facts are similar. The governor threatens to withhold state money unless the organization fires someone he doesn’t like. And, as the OPEGA report and the other cases make clear, the governor is content to hurt innocent bystanders — college students, at-risk youth and all of Aroostook County — if it suits his purposes.

Given this pattern of behavior, it’s time for the Legislature to expand its review and oversight of the governor’s activities.

Committees of oversight should begin an audit of contract awards and changes to ensure that appropriate legal requirements were followed and that the governor did not exert undue influence with the expenditure of state dollars — to either reward friends or punish political opponents.

Legislators should also look at changes to existing contracts, particularly in large departments such as the Department of Health and Human Services and Transportation to ensure that their original scope of work is not being rewritten to avoid legislative oversight.

The governor has demonstrated that he’s willing to push the bounds of appropriate behavior and the law to get what he wants. It’s time for a thorough accounting of what he’s been up to and what else he might be trying to hide.

David Farmer

About David Farmer

David Farmer is a political and media consultant in Portland, where he lives with his wife and two children. He was senior adviser to Democrat Mike Michaud’s campaign for governor and a longtime journalist. You can reach him at dfarmer14@hotmail.com.