During his monthly legal briefing to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission on May 15, Jim Goodhart, the agency’s lead counsel, requested a pay raise for himself.

The commission conducts its work meetings on the third Wednesday of the month. That’s where the commission creates the policies and regulations it presents to the public on the following Thursday. Each division provides the commission a detailed report on its activities.

These are the meetings where wildlife management area managers beg for a few pennies to fix aging tractors, repair worn out agricultural equipment, plant a few food plots for wildlife or do some other much needed habitat management.

In more than eight years of covering the commission, the May 15 meeting was the first I’ve ever seen an employee use his division’s briefing to request a personal benefit.

Goodhart explained that his job classification was upgraded, but he didn’t get a raise because his salary is capped at about $88,000, plus the state’s generous benefits package. He asked the commission to do whatever possible to improve his personal situation.

Besides Goodhart, the AGFC employs three other attorneys. The four of them earn, minus benefits, a total of about $248,000 per year. Even so, the legal division frequently uses private attorneys to do its work, at great expense to the public.

On May 15, Goodhart said the commission has spent an average of $250,000 per year for the past five years to hire private legal representation. That’s almost double the salaries of its four staff attorneys, and it equals $1.25 million over the past five years alone.

The commission often bemoans how expensive it is to maintain its assets. For $1.25 million, the AGFC could have fixed a lot of tractors and cultivated a lot of food plots. It could have done a lot of much-needed habitat maintenance on public and private land to help recover distressed species like bobwhite quail and wild turkeys.

For $1.25 million, it could have stocked a lot of fish in our lakes and streams.

For $1.25 million, it could have bought a lot of equipment to help its wildlife officers catch poachers.

Imagine the prime wildlife habitat the AGFC could have bought for that kind of money, places where the public could hunt and fish.

Over these past five years, Goodhart was a primary player in the AGFC’s attempt to contravene the state constitution by crafting a capricious freedom of information policy that was much less transparent than the state Freedom of Information Act. Mike Freeze, a former member of the commission, said Goodhart argued for years that the AGFC was not subject to the state FOI Act or the state administrative procedures act. Freeze said that under that commission’s insistence, Scott Henderson, the AGFC’s former director, forbade him from pursuing it.

When a majority of the commission voted to replace Henderson with Loren Hitchcock in 2010, the AGFC’s legal division quickly quickly put the policy in motion.

Goodhart’s legal divisional so served this writer a subpoena at a public meeting during the AGFC’s lawsuit with Sheffield Nelson, a former commissioner who sued the AGFC in 2010 over the Freedom of Information Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. The subpoena was a bullying tactic to squelch what some commissioners considered to be negative reporting on the commission’s activities at that time.

Most recently, Goodhart and his hired hands attempted to force Responsive Management to divulge the raw data of the AGFC’s employee morale survey. Responsive Management conducted the survey in 2012 at the commission’s request. Employees blistered Goodhart, Hitchcock, commissioner Emon Mahony and former commissioner Rick Watkins in that document. Through its private attorneys, the AGFC’s legal division reached out to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and to Nelson to form a legal coalition to obtain comments that employees submitted under the promise of anonymity. Both parties refused, and the effort died for lack of oxygen.

Goodhart has had some good moments. With considerable assistance from his private legal team, he successfully appealed an unfavorable ruling from a lower court before the U.S. Supreme Court regarding timber damage at Black River WMA.

Conversely, Goodhart has also helped bring shame upon the commission, and upon the agency’s employees who had no part in the widely publicized misdeeds of the recent past.

Everybody wants more money, and for a lawyer, there’s plenty in the private sector. At least $1.25 million. Capping Goodhart’s salary might show him that it’s time for him to move on.

Sports, Pages 30 on 06/16/2013