Its out! From the Bismarck Tribune this morning. I won't quote the story because their isn't a distinct headline in it. Here's the scoop: Bob Stenehjem, the North Dakota State Senate Majority Leader's(and everybody's favorite failed State Public Service Commissioner candidate) day job is at the city of Bismarck as a street foreman in the department of public works.
As a salaried employee Stenehjem is not required to keep a constant log of his hours, but he does have to put in a request for leave two weeks ahead of time in order to get it approved to get the time off for days that he will be gone. Mike Scully, one of the city employees under him started to keep track of the times he did not show up in the office or left for a half day, etc. with the suspicion that Stenehjem was not being entirely accurate with his leave requests to the city when he went away to do legislative work. He appears to be correct from all I can gather(although we can't be conclusive, more on that later). This document, retrieved by an open records request(ND's Freedom of Information act) is the easiest to understand.
Remember the date on that memo on the first page. April 21, 2008. It'll be important later. The next three pages are Scully's records. He has taken the time to remove the legitimate days that do show leave time taken off from the list, so what is here is the time that appears to be unaccounted for. It amounts to-as the Tribune reporter so kindly has calculated for us-105 hours stolen from the City of Bismarck. The next pages are the city's payroll records from the same period('05-'07) note that the days that he is gone on the previous pages do not show up here at all. A clue, Sherlock! Lastly, the final few pages are from the legislative council, showing that Stenehjem was, in fact, working at the legislature most of the time he did not show up.
One missing piece of the puzzle here is Stenehjem's leave requests that he was supposed to fill out. I filed an open records request with Charlie Whitman, the city's lawyer, but open records requests are cost-prohibitive. Try $400 for 26 leave requests during this time period. They are apparently all done by hand and would take 12 minutes or so each to look up, and since I'm not Sandy Blunt, it costs me $25 an hour to retrieve those records(minus the first hour). I'm broke already. Anyone got an extra $400?
Don't bother.
When I talked to Scully he explained to me how strict Bob is with his employees. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "If we're even 2 minutes late to punch in he will make us request leave for it," so I'm not buying his "I was there earlier and later than they were, so nobody saw me" excuse. Prove it.
Of course, he can't and we can't either. We'll never be able to really get to the bottom of this. There is one body does have the authority to gather records from the city, and the duty to look into things like this. That would be the city's Ethics Committee. This document is the city's ethics code. From page 4:
Upon receipt of a complaint by the Human Resources Director or a Business Ethics Committee member, the Human Resources Director shall immediately provide a copy of the complaint to each member of the Business Ethics Committee and shall schedule a meeting of the Committee within ten (10) business days of the receipt of the complaint.
Remember that date I told you to keep in the back of your head? April 21, 2008? That would be 124 days ago. No ethics committee meeting has taken place. Apparently mike didn't use the word, "complaint" when he submitted all the information he found, so they don't consider it one. So it really depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is...
I should also point out in all of this that Stenehjem was a cosponsor of HCR 3016, the Equal Opportunity Appointment Act, which if enacted last June, would have allowed the governor to appoint a legislator to a statewide office(like in Stenehjem's case, Tax Commisioner) even if they voted to jack the pay of that office up during the last session. That way he can screw the city and the state taxpayers out of their money at the same time. The voters were smart enough to see through the lunacy of that measure, lets hope that his constituents can get rid of the lunatic that keeps screwing them out of their money.
North Dakota is dominated by the state's republican party. They control the entire legislature and the governor's office. They have been in complete control of the government and have done their best to keep this story quiet. If you can, donate to Bob's opponent, Chris Ebertz by going here(working on this, his website is http://www.chrisebertz.com but I can't find a donate link. His running mate, Casey, has an easy donate site: http://www.votecasey.com/... which you can contribute to. Donate to the state Dem-NPL party here, and to getting Tim Mathern elected Governor here.
Help us out and show the rethugs in ND that they have to remain accountable. We need it up here.
Here is another more confusing report that the City of Bismarck created, showing expense reports filed.