Public Safety official grilled over document

Published November 24, 2015

by Matt Caulder, Capitol Connection, November 23, 2015.

State legislators grilled top McCrory administration officials on Wednesday about a deal to extend contracts for prison maintenance to a Charlotte developer.

Much of the seven-hour Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Government Operations meeting centered on whether McCrory directed Frank Perry to extend the contract for a year, and a memo, written by Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety (DPS) Joe Prater.

In the personal memo, Prater summarized the Oct. 28, 2014 meeting between DPS officials, TKC Management Services officials and the governor.

Contained in the memo is a statement indicating that developer Graeme Keith Sr., who heads TKC, made comments to the effect that he deserved something for his political contributions over the years.

The memo says that Keith said he had been working on private prison maintenance for over 10 years and that “during that time (he) had given a lot of money to candidates running for public office and it was now time for him to get something in return.”

In a statement released after the meeting, Keith said that neither he nor anyone at TKC had “expressed any expectation” that the firm would win a state contact on ground other than the firm’s experience in the field.

DPS Secretary Perry, a former FBI agent, said that Keith had actually made comments like this to him another three times, including calling him at his home.

“I didn’t see the comment as being a crime. It was inappropriate. It was uncomfortable to hear it,” Perry said. “But there has been no quid pro quo and therefore no crime.”

Perry said that he did not make a report of Keith’s comments to the governor, at first shaking them off as jest.

“The first time I heard it was in my office, I take it last year or early last year I don’t remember,” he said. “But I considered it perhaps a personality style. In fact the first time I heard it I thought it was in jest or lighthearted, but I’d heard it then too many times, it was simply inappropriate.”

Of interest to Sen. Harry Brown (R-Jones), who questioned Perry a half-dozen times about the memo throughout the discussions, in addition to the content was the uncertain understanding of its origins.

Brown first mentioned the memo’s contents in a line of questioning to Perry, but shifted interests to the lack of documentation about the memo’s origins, and eventually how it was apparently deleted.

Brown questioned why Perry had not seen the memo until a public records request uncovered it.

It came to light that the memo appeared to be for personal use, and was not circulated among the DPS staff, Perry said.

“Senator, I think I saw it earlier this year pursuant to a public records request,” he said.

Brown asked Perry about the origins of the memo and if it was written on a state computer, to which Perry responded that he assumed it was, but had no proof of that, stating that he did not have forensics performed on the memo.

“If you are asking if I did forensics, I did not,” he said.

Perry said that he took Prater at his word that the memo was written following the Oct. 2014 meeting for personal use.

“I took the substance of Mr. Prater’s comments to me to be accurate,” he said. “He drafted it for himself. He has his own file.”

Later in the meeting, it became apparent that the original copy of the memo on the DPS system has been deleted.

“It was a memo to his own file and then he deleted it. I don’t know if I mentioned that to you, Senator, but we know he deleted it,” Perry said. “We’ve tried to look for it but it was deleted, so it was just something he printed out but didn’t even use.”

Under North Carolina law, a document is a public record if it was created “in connection with the transaction of public business.”

In North Carolina, the destruction of a public record is a Class III misdemeanor, punishable by a fine between $10 and $500.

Brown instructed Perry to investigate the circumstances surrounding the deleting of the record and to report back to the committee.

“On the memo, you mentioned, or I think you made the comment that Mr. Prater destroyed the copy, and I guess my question to you is, did he destroy a public record?” Brown said. “So what I’m going to ask you to do is an electronic search in the DPS computers on these records and report back to this committee because I have a great concern about that if you’re telling us that he deleted his copy and nobody knows how this copy was generated, when it was generated, I just want to know a little more.”

Perry responded, “You got it.”

Inquiries with DPS to speak with Prater as well as communications to Brown’s office went unanswered as of press time.

Keith releases statement on comments

Keith’s statement, released after the hearing, said, “The statement being attributed to me in an unsigned, undated, highly questionable DPS memo and by Secretary Frank Perry in Wednesday’s legislative hearing is a gross misrepresentation. It is nothing more than an attempt to discredit me and turn the conversation away from the dramatic savings that could be achieved by privatizing prison maintenance.

“As I have stated previously, neither I nor anybody at TKC Management Services has ever had or expressed any expectation that our company should be considered for or awarded state prison maintenance work on any grounds other than our experience and track record of delivering cost savings while providing high-quality service. It was on this basis that we were awarded the prison maintenance contracts, first in 2006 and again in 2011, in both instances following an open, competitive bidding process.

“As Secretary Perry and North Carolina Budget Director Lee Roberts made clear today, the contract extension granted by the state in late 2014 was based on the cost savings achieved by our services. The efforts to discredit TKC Management Services are the result of entrenched interests in the North Carolina Department of Public Safety that are opposed to privatization.”

http://nccapitolconnection.com/2015/11/23/dps-official-grilled-over-document/