What would you do if your husband came home one day and triumphantly announced, “Honey, guess what I just bought?” You might just calmly put down that novel that you have been meaning to read for the last decade on the side table right next to a beckoning glass of iced tea, look interested, and say “Oh, you’ve finally bought Joe’s Piper Cub?” You knew that the love-of-your-life’s latest passion has been to pick up a used but reliable propeller plane so that he and his three buddies could hop around the Sierra and go fishing. “Well, yes,” your one and only excitedly responds, “I bought a plane…it’s a 747!” You blurt out several high-pitched sounds that may be roughly translated into “What are you crazy?” You think to yourself, “Why would you need such a huge plane to cart around three guys and a grand total of two fish?” Then you knock over the glass of iced tea onto Fluffy, your once loyal cat, and quickly start to think of creative ways of slipping a sleeping pill into sweetie pie’s coffee so that you can run to the bank and put a stop order on the cashier’s check before your life’s savings disappears into the wild blue yonder.

I thought of this seemingly improbable story as I followed the two-month investigation by the Joint Legislature Audit Committee into the Davis Administration’s approval of a $95 million non-bid contract to purchase 271,000 licenses – more than one license for every state employee - of sophisticated Oracle software. As it was explained to me, the particular Oracle software has such sophisticated data tracking and manipulation capabilities, that it is doubtful whether it would be useful to a few if any state employees. Maybe such software would be useful to Federal Express as they tracked the journeys of millions of packages across the country. For instance, they could tell you exactly where Aunt Millie’s birthday present is as it makes its way from Auburn to Kansas City. But the sophisticated Oracle software, with all its data crunching capabilities, seems pretty useless to the DMV clerk who tells you that you missed questions 7, 9, and 17 on the driver’s test. As the state hurried to approve the sole source contract with Oracle in a record 22 days, no department head or high official in the Davis Administration asked or even cared to ask for an independent analysis to determine whether every single state employee needed the software equivalent of a 747 instead of a reliable Piper Cub to do their jobs.

President Truman had a little sign on his desk that said, “The Buck Stops Here.” But, as we learned from the two-month legislative investigation into the Oracle scandal, it became clear that in this Administration, the buck didn’t stop anywhere. No one was going to be held accountable for being the final decision-maker on a contract that the State Auditor said could waste $41 million in taxpayer funds. When the contract was given the fast-track treatment in March 2001, Debbie Leibrock, a respected computer procurement expert with the Department of Finance, raised concerns with her boss, Tim Gage, the director of the powerful department, that there was no independent study regarding whether the software was a cost-effective purchase for the state. On March 31, 2001, Director Gage sent an email to Leibrock saying that he had approved the $95 million software contract and that “obviously, this sort of ‘on the fly’ review of such a significant proposal is not what we would prefer, but we don’t always set the rules.”

Well, who does set the rules? Who has the power to roll Tim Gage, the most powerful department head in Sacramento and the Governor’s top budget advisor? It’s hard to think of a scenario in which Director Gage would bend the rules on a multi-million dollar procurement contract without being told to do so. Only two people have that kind of power, Deputy Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy, the acknowledged power behind the throne, and Governor Gray Davis. Susan Kennedy told the legislative committee investigating the Oracle scandal that she gave the final sign-off on the contract as a “routine” matter. I guess if you are in government long enough, $95 million begins to look like chump change. Governor Davis, a notorious micro-manager and prolific fundraiser, told the press that “he had no idea this contract was being negotiated,” adding “this is not a matter that would normally come to my attention.”

Did Deputy Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy and Governor Davis tell the truth? Despite 110 hours of testimony from 30 witnesses before the committee, we still don’t know the answer to this simple question. But the hearings certainly brought out into the sunshine the dark and disturbing “pay to play” culture - campaign contributions in exchange for no-bid contracts - that has permeated the Capitol when it was revealed Arun Baheti, Davis’ director of E-Government, accepted a $25,000 check for the Davis campaign from Oracle’s lobbyist, Ravi Mehta only two days after the software contract was approved.

As we note the fact that it’s been 30 years since the Watergate break-in, one would think that politicians would appreciate a search for the truth. On July 2nd, only two weeks after the Joint Legislative Audit Committee concluded its hearings on the Oracle scandal, Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson removed the Audit Chairman Dean Florez from the committee altogether after Florez has published a scathing article that gave his opinion that the contract was fast-tracked through the process for “political and monetary considerations.” Apparently, Assemblyman Florez was a little too aggressive and honest in his search for answers as to what caused the scandal. And now the investigation of the scandal is in hands of Attorney General Lockyer, a political alley of Governor Davis.

Copyright 2002 The Auburn Sentinel