Vendor-paid trip involving Henrico school officials raises questions

In the business world, the rule is clear: If you buy things for your company, you shouldn't let the company's vendors give you gifts.

In some Richmond-area governments, the rules are a bit murkier.

Chesterfield and Hanover counties say employees may not travel at a vendor's expense or accept gifts from contractors. Richmond bars employees from accepting gifts of favors from a contractor, including travel.

Henrico County follows state conflict-of-interest rules that say officials can't accept gifts, including plane tickets and hotel stays, if those gifts and their timing might lead reasonable people to question whether those officials could remain impartial to the gift-giver.

In Henrico, the School Board and then-Superintendent Fred S. Morton IV said they felt that line was not crossed this year when they allowed an architecture firm that had just won a $1.1 million contract to pay for a trip they took.

In January, Moseley Architects spent $9,000 to send a dozen Henrico officials, including a board member and the superintendent, to Las Vegas and Phoenix to inspect schools.

School Board Chairman John Montgomery, who went on the trip, said the school system handles vendor or contractor payments for trips and other expenses on a case-by-case basis. Four of the Henrico officials who went on the trip were voting members of the committee that recommended hiring Moseley, and two more were nonvoting members of the committee.

"There's a bright line -- there can't be any quid pro quo," Montgomery said.

While Henrico's policy follows the state standard that officials should avoid gifts that could raise questions about their impartiality, Henrico Director of Human Resources George H. Cauble Jr. says his advice is simpler:

"Generally, I tell people if someone tries to give you a gift, say no politely," Cauble said.

Patrick Russo, Henrico's new superintendent, said that in Hampton, where he worked until this month, vendors paid for school and city officials to visit schools in South Carolina and Florida similar to the new schools Hampton is building.

"That's standard operating procedure, as long as the contract has already gone through the proper procurement processes and is signed," he said. He said careful monitoring of change-orders is a way to ensure such trips don't influence officials to favor the vendor.

In Richmond, where there have been no vendor-paid trips in recent years, two School Board members were chastised, but not sanctioned, in 2006 when a group interested in setting up a charter school in the city paid for them to travel to a charter-school conference in California.

While the ethics rules of the Institute for Supply Management, the professional association of corporate purchasing executives, says members should avoid accepting gifts, services or favors from current suppliers, as well as people seeking their business, experts on government conflicts say it is a more nuanced question for public employees.

"You need to look at what they were doing. If they spent their days looking at schools, that's one thing; if there were spouses and lots of idle time, that's another," said Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for Common Cause, a nonprofit group that campaigns to increase government accountability.

"The concern is whether a thing like this is a way to influence someone, but in this case the architect had already won the contract."

The timing of the contract award and trip address the main ethical concern, said Virginia Commonwealth University professor William C. Bosher Jr., who has served as state superintendent of public instruction, as well as superintendent in Henrico and Chesterfield.

"While the number of people involved and the cost are all potential issues for debate, I would not think that the legal, administrative or 'smell' tests would indicate any impropriety," he said. "The question is probably not could they take the trip, but rather should they have taken the trip."

The trip involved visiting two vocational high schools in Phoenix on one day and a similar school in Las Vegas the next. Most of the group flew back to Richmond the day after.

"If I'm going to go on a boondoggle, I'm not going to get on an airplane on Sunday, fly all day -- it's three time zones -- spend all day Monday touring schools, get on a plane Monday night, spend most of Tuesday touring school and catch the red-eye back Tuesday night," Morton said.

He said he and the School Board felt it was all right to accept Moseley's gift because money was tight.

"It was important for my own education and experience to visit these facilities and talk to the folks who planned and who teach in these facilities," said Moseley Architects Vice President Douglas D. Westmoreland, who brought the Las Vegas school to the attention of Henrico officials in November after it won a prize from the Council of Educational Facility Planners International.

Westmoreland said the idea of visiting other facilities first came up at a meeting with school officials the month after the School Board approved the contract. He said Moseley often travels with school officials to visit sites, through most are day trips, but that there were no facilities like the one Henrico wanted to build in the area.

Former School Board Chairman Stuart Myers, who served on the board from 2000 to 2007, including the last three as chairman, said that during his tenure, board members never traveled at vendors' expense. Tours of out-of-town schools would normally involve only two or three employees, picked for their expertise, he said.

"Justified or not, elected officials invite public criticism when they award a professional-services contract to a company and then accept travel to a high profile destination from the same firm. School Board members in past years have not taken such trips for this reason," he said.

Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or .