Only 15 members of the Arkansas Legislature wrote letters to state administrators of a drug abuse prevention fund from 2007 to 2017 suggesting where they should send some of the $6.3 million the Legislature gave the fund, state records show.
The letters were written in response to requests from grant applicants who knew about the fund, according to those interviewed.
A total of 25 letters of recommendation went to administrators of the state's Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment Fund from lawmakers, state records show. The fund awarded grants to nonprofit entities around the state to curb substance abuse. The fund is managed by the Behavioral Health Services Division of the state Department of Human Services.
All 25 letters arrived within one week of each other in 2013, at a time when the fund was particularly flush with state General Improvement Fund money, copies of the letters and other state records show.
The drug fund came up in the April 30 guilty plea of former lawmaker Henry "Hank" Wilkins IV of Pine Bluff, who served in both the state Senate and House in his political career. He wrote three of those 25 letters and received cash from the recipients of each or their lobbyist in return, according to his plea. No other lawmakers are accused of taking bribes from the fund.
Lawmakers get requests for letters of support routinely for a variety of causes, said David Johnson, a former state senator from Little Rock who also served in the House. State Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, also of Little Rock, agreed. Both were among the 15 letter writers.
"I checked, and I have done 146 of these support letters," Hutchinson said.
Only one of Hutchinson's letters was for a drug fund grant, state records show. It was on behalf of Decision Point, a Bentonville-based substance abuse treatment provider, state records show.
"My policy is that I will forward the request to the Senate staff to write a support letter for anyone who requests one and whom I don't have fundamental disagreements with," Hutchinson said. The anti-abortion Hutchinson said he wouldn't write a letter of support for Planned Parenthood, for instance.
Johnson and other lawmakers who wrote letters to the fund administrators described the same procedure. Those lawmakers included Sen. Linda Chesterfield and Joyce Elliott of Little Rock, Rep. Dan Douglas of Bentonville and Rep. Jeff Wardlaw of Hermitage. Wardlaw said Friday the corruption case has tainted the process even for deserving causes now. Former state Rep. Darrin Williams of Little Rock also said it was routine to forward requests for letters from known good causes to staff.
Elliott, Johnson, Wardlaw, Williams and and former state Rep. Sheilla E. Lampkin of Monticello wrote no letters endorsing grants to a group identified in Wilkins' guilty plea, according to comparison of the letters with court documents. Lampkin passed away from cancer in 2016.
"I was always pretty prompt about taking care of things," Johnson said. "For a grant request, I would have forwarded that email to Senate staff along with the body of a letter that I wanted to send." Records show he sent a letter in support of the Little Rock Community Mental Health Center.
None of the lawmakers interviewed could give a definite reason for the one-week interval for all the letters. Sen. Cecile Bledsoe of Rogers, who was one of the six lawmakers who sent a letter of recommendation for Decision Point, requested legislative staff to look up who sent the request to her. The search produced an email, forwarded by Bledsoe, showing the request to her came from a Matt Sullivan with the email suffix of Decision Point's parent company.
State Sen. Eddie Cheatham of Crossett, who sent five of the letters, said the most likely reason for the one-week rush of correspondence was the drug fund received a record amount of General Improvement Fund money that year. The Behavioral Health Division would have received the money at the beginning of the state's fiscal year on July 1, he said. It would take some weeks for the grant application process, making late October the right time for the letters to have any effect and the logical time for grant applicants to reach out for lawmakers' support, he said.
State finance records show lawmakers pledged $2.95 million of state lawmaker's share of the General Improvement Fund to the drug fund that year, about half of the $6.3 million the fund received from that source from 2007 to 2017.
The first public sign in Arkansas of fraud involving Decision Point and other recipients of drug fund grants came with the guilty plea of former state Rep. Micah Neal on Jan. 4, 2017. His co-conspirator, Sen. Jon Woods, was indicted the following March and convicted May 3. Until Neal's plea, all legislators knew of bribe-related grants to bribe-related nonprofit groups was that those groups provided vital services, letter-writing lawmakers said in interviews.
"I don't remember who asked me to write a letter of recommendation, but I remember who convinced me -- John Scott," said former state House member Sue Scott of Rogers. Her husband, John, is a circuit judge in Benton County. He said Decision Point had produced good results in the treatment of drug and alcohol abusers brought before his court, Sue Scott said.
Scott grew more familiar with Decision Point after and would support them again if she were back in the Legislature, she said.
In rural Arkansas, some of those entities were the only such service providers, said Cheatham and Sen. Bruce Maloch of Magnolia. Both senators said local school district officials were strongly supportive of the work done by the entities they recommended.
The 15 state lawmakers who wrote at least one letter were: Cheatham, Scott, Hutchinson, Johnson, Bledsoe, Maloch, Wilkins, Chesterfield, Neal, Woods, Wardlaw, Williams and Lampkin.
Attorneys for Woods and Wilkins didn't reply to requests for comment. The attorney for Neal said his client had fully disclosed all relevant information to federal investigators.
NW News on 06/03/2018