I was poking around on the Contract Sunshine site today - the state's contracts database - to follow up on a lead from my last diary, and I decided to pull up a list of contracts procured by the governor's office. I looked first at just this fiscal biennium and was shocked to find a contract for nearly $1.5 million dollars from just this past December (on my birthday, in fact!). And guess what it was for? Legal services.
The details page (if you can call it that) doesn't say to whom the money is for or for what legal issues; it just says "Legal Services", and it drops the dollar amount to $500K, as you can see below, but I'm guessing that's just what's actually been paid on the contract through the last update of April 5, 2012:
Now, I'm not trying to say this is something bad or wrong or illegal or anything, and I'm not even trying to say it's suspicious - because, for all I know, this is for a perfectly legitimate, essential, state purpose. In fact, I don't doubt it is. I'm just pointing it out. It stood out on the list...what can I say? Pull up the list for yourself and see if it doesn't just slap you in the face!
But...you know, what's weird is that I've looked at dozens of these listings over the the past few days, and one thing I've noticed about this one that's different from the others I've looked at, is that the dollar amount on the main list is not the same as the dollar amount on the details page. I don't know what that means, and (again), I'm not trying to say this is something bad or wrong or illegal or suspicious, I'm just pointing it out. You know, I'm just saying... (Update: Actually, it's probably what I just said: only part of it has been paid.)
Of course, I didn't stop there - (truly) out of fairness, I figured if I'm going to check out what Walker's been spending, I should check on Doyle, too. So I pulled up everything for the Gov's office and got a list of 28 items spanning from 2008 - 2012; so, pretty much Doyle's last 2 years and Walker's first 2 (actually, it's about 1.5 for each). Anyway, I must say, I was very disappointed by what I found: Doyle had contracts for legal services, too! (I knew I'd find some there but, still, it was disappointing...)
The difference is, Walker's one on December 5, 2011 *was 10 times more than the highest one on Doyle's list:
UPDATE 11:00 PM - It's actually 28 times higher: the 10 times higher is based on what has been paid on the contract to date (or, so it appears). *~NR
In fact, Walker's spending for The Office of the Governor from February 2011 through May 2012 (16 months) was more than 6 times higher than Doyle's was for June 2008 through September 2010 (16 months) for the same office. Walker's tally in that time was $2,150,200, compared to Doyle's $345,000.
*I THOUGHT HE SAID WE WERE BROKE?!?