Do its officials have personal privilege to fly at will?
by Barry Henderson
How is it that the TVA chairman gets to fly in the agency's leased aircraft, back and forth to Tupelo, Miss., weekly, at electric ratepayers' expense, without incurring the sort of wrath that sent the University of Tennessee's most recent president packing? John Shumaker was flying back and forth to Birmingham on personal business on a UT plane regularly. UT and its taxpaying public wouldn't stand for it, and he's gone at the governor's blunt suggestion.
Tupelo is in the TVA region, but it's hardly a center of agency business. It's the home of Glenn McCullough, chairman of the TVA Board, and his trips there to spend weekends with his family are hardly business trips. TVA's spinners say McCullough's "official duty station" is in Tupelo. But TVA headquarters is in Knoxville. Never before has a TVA Board member been quartered so far off the beaten path. Of more than 600 trips McCullough's taken aboard TVA's leased plane with TVA pilots, more than 250 have been to Tupelo or to Knoxville, according to a published record from the TVA flight logs.
Worse, the plane has flown empty 900-plus times in the same period. The aircraft was very likely quite often dead-headed at $1,500 an hour to leave off McCullough and come back later to pick him up.
The cost of the flights in and out of Tupelo totals upwards of a half-million dollars at that rate. TVA puts McCullough up at the Radisson, across the street from the TVA towers, for a special rate of $55 a night when he's in town, which is some nights every week. That means putting up McCullough here and transporting him back and forth to Tupelo has cost the agency about as much as the chairman's annual $142,000 salary over the years.
There are many other air trips on the TVA plane by McCullough and other board members and officials that are business trips on their face and can be expected, and justified, in a seven-state agency with as many outposts and aspects as TVA has. But the Tupelo connection sticks out sorely.
TVA Board members are underpaid among their utility peers. They're overpaid, however, if their prior public or private utility experience is figured in. This board has none. The three members are paid about right politically, which is how they—and particularly Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's buddy McCullough—were picked. McCullough is a former mayor of Tupelo, a little county seat city of less the 40,000. Now he's titular head of the nation's largest supplier of electric power. To say he's in over his titular head is an understatement of some proportion. Still, the fact remains that TVA will fly him anywhere, anytime. Four TVA pilots are on call. It's a political perk, like have a personal "official duty station" in your backyard is a political perk.
The TVA "official" position is that it's on the up and up—all covered in the federal regulations—and that McCullough himself asked the TVA Inspector General's office in July to conduct a review of the agency's aircraft use and make recommendations as to its efficiency and effectiveness. That IG report is expected by the end of this year. We can hardly wait.
John Shumaker should be laughing, but he's probably still crying over spilled aviation fuel.
Walk, Don't Paddle
Mike Hammond, the operations manager for Citadel Broadcasting's Knoxville area radio stations, is considering a run at Knox County Commission's 5th District seat in the unlikely event that Commissioner Mike Arms, who's serving as County Mayor Mike Ragsdale's chief of staff, actually resigns his Commission post. Arms says he's leaving the Commission, but he's been talked—or talked himself—into staying before.
Hammond, in his slow, measured baritone, has been murmuring about running for Commission for months. The veteran of years of on- and off-the-air radio work is among those responsible for the bizarre handling of the WOKI 100.3 The River fiasco when Citadel took it over this summer.
He used to be a news reporter, then a talk-show host and UT Vols announcer and commentator, and as a station manager he got into government peripherally when asked to join a county government efficiency panel a few years back. As chair of the panel and its spokesperson, Hammond should not be held totally responsible for the problems the group encountered or the county's failure to put its recommendations into practice.
But if that's his best qualification for testing the waters for elective office, the word that comes to mind is sink, Mike, sink.
October 23, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 43
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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