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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Keeping up with
the (June) JonesIF I were to tell you that Linda Lingle is being paid a half-million bucks by supporters to supplement her crummy governor's salary, you might agree that that is a good thing. Being governor is a thankless job. Ask Ben Cayetano. Nobody ever thanked him.
Being governor means you are the highest-ranking state government employee and yet you're not the highest paid. The university football coach makes more than you, for instance. So does the university president. And maybe even the university lawn mower guy.
So it would be great if some rich dudes coughed up a pile of money so the governor could live in a manner to which she hoped to become accustomed.
It would be weird, not to mention probably illegal, if the names of the people who gave her money were kept secret. There's a fine line between generosity and attempted bribery. Actually, it's a big fat line. The governor can't even eat a free lunch without someone in the opposing party accusing her of taking kickback from the Lunch Wagon Lobby.
So everyone understands why the governor actually is NOT receiving $400,000 from secret admirers. What they don't understand is why UH football coach June Jones is.
Critics are amazed that $800,000 would be paid to the football coach at a university, and a fairly small one at that. This guy is getting NEARLY A MILLION DOLLARS for teaching large young men how to transport a ball up and down a striped lawn! But like someone who doesn't see the double reverse handoff, the critics are missing the point: Half of that salary is being paid by secret donors. That's right. The UH will not identify the people who are paying Jones more than the governor makes.
What's wrong with that?
JUST SO WE don't hurt anyone's feelings and, more important, to avoid any nasty lawsuits, let's make this discussion hypothetical. Let's say a football coach in Las Vegas was being paid half a million bucks by secret supporters. It turns out that those secret supporters are gamblers. I'll leave it to you to determine the motive for the gamblers' largess. But don't you think Nevada taxpayers would like to know if half their university football coach's salary was being paid by gamblers? Or organized crime figures. Or bank presidents. Or the university's lawn mower guy.
The hypothetical coach is paid by taxpayers to win games. How do taxpayers know whether he's doing what they are paying him to do or doing what a secret contributor is paying him for? That could be anything from winning games to not beating the point spread to letting the contributor's scrawny nephew play linebacker.
I trust June Jones would not do anything wrong to favor a secret contributor. But there's an old saying: Trust everyone but cut the cards. And taxpayers need to know who's paying for the deck.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com