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October 08, 2005
Purging Down the House: District 15
I will do my best to do some real investigating on my own, and not simply parrot Bill Hobbs, but the fact is that he has provided sufficient material for our second target only a day after this thing got started.
Meet Joe Armstrong, Representative from Knoxville's 15th House District and former employee, board member, and chairman of Tengasco.
Read Hobbs' article (linked above photo), and the second part of a related piece (also authored by Hobbs).
Then look at what else I found. (I don't have a LexisNexis; I drive a Google.) In its February 2001 newsletter, the Tennessee Oil and Gas Association (cute acronym: TOGA) mentions that its President (Bill Goodwin) testified before a "sub-committee on natural gas deregulation" on the topics: 1) receiving state-sponsored marketing support and 2) exploration on state land. The subcommittee's chairman? Joe Armstrong.
Fast-forward ten or so months. As Bill Hobbs points out, Armstrong was responsible for TOGA getting an audience with a Governor's working group, wherein Goodwin testified on very similar topics.
So, not only was Rep. Armstrong failing to list Tengasco as a source of income on his conflict-of-interest filings (PDFs linked in container to the right) until 2004*; in (at least) the 2001 legislative session, he chaired a subcommittee that oversaw oil and gas exploration, while he was employed by an oil and gas exploration firm.
(*One of the other TREF filings (2001) vaguely lists "Gas and Oil Exploration" under the Investments heading, but not under the Sources of Income.)
Maybe I simply don't realize how common this sort of thing is. I'm still learning about our state government, and I do know that there is a balance, given that we have a part-time legislature, to be struck somewhere between A) having people run these committees who know nothing of the subject material, and B) the proverbial "foxes guarding the henhouse." I know that others have been written about for similar appearances of conflict. It's likely that nothing illegal has occurred in many of these situations, but are these things ethical? Are the citizens that Rep. Armstrong represents getting his full focus, or is too much interplay with an industry that employs him cluttering that representation? (One can see how being chair of a legislative subcommittee that pushes legislation beneficial to an industry could help a person climb quickly in that industry: say, all the way to Chairman of the Board.)
Your feedback is essential here. I only sort of know what I'm doing. Am I making too much of all of this, or is there a serious problem? Until I hear otherwise, I'm going with the latter. Mark this seat Purge in 2006.
State House Elections | By joe lance | 09:15 PM