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July 01, 2009, 03:29 PM ET
Lawmaker Wrote His Own Job Description for Florida College
Exchanging e-mail messages about sensitive, politically connected hires is a big risk, as college chiefs at North Carolina State University and now Northwest Florida State College have learned the hard way.
James R. Richburg was fired in April as president of the two-year college over an alleged $6-million political boondoggle. He and a former state lawmaker, Rep. Ray Sansom, are accused of falsely securing state money to build an aircraft hangar for a friend and major political donor. They both face felony misconduct charges.
While in the Legislature, Mr. Sansom helped steer $35-million in state money to the college. In what critics call a quid pro quo, Northwest Florida State last year hired him as vice president for external affairs, a part-time job with a $110,000 annual salary.
Mr. Sansom had an unusually hands-on role in his job’s creation: He drafted his own contract. In an e-mail exchange released by state investigators, which was published by the St. Petersburg Times, he sent Mr. Richburg a three-page draft description of the position, including the salary and various job tasks. Other messages between the two surfaced as part of a lengthy report released by the investigators.
One of Mr. Sansom’s self-generated job duties was to work on the college’s transition to offering four-year degrees, part of a broad effort in Florida that has provoked a backlash among the state’s universities.
Mr. Sansom tried to land a post at Northwest Florida State two decades earlier, according to the newspaper. He was a finalist to be an assistant to Mr. Richburg, who had become president in 1987. That job eventually went to Bolley (Bo) Johnson, a state lawmaker, who left the post in 1992 and later went to prison for tax evasion.
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