And speaking of better late than never, there's a rather parochial issue I'd like to jump into big time involving political corruption, violation of consumer trust and dirty dealings, all (it would appear) to be laid at the door of the newly re-elected governor of Pennsylvania. This is a matter of little or no interest to anyone outside the borders of this Commonwealth, but I'm going to detour (occasionally) from my usual concerns to focus on this over the near future, so those of you who it doesn't interest can just skip over these posts. Here's the story.
By way of introduction, I will confess to being a wino, a/k/a wine geek, a/k/a ... no, that word's too pretentious. I actually do have a wine blog that's cleverly(?) disguised so as to have no connection to this one (but then I never post there, so who cares?)
By way of further introduction, I'll note that Pennsylvania has one of the most outmoded, antiquated, idiotic mechanisms for the sale of alcoholic beverages to the consuming public on the face of the planet. That is, of course, excluding Saudi Arabia and Utah. Or did, until a gentleman by the name of Jonathan Newman took over the leadership of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.
In Pennsylvania, you see, there is no private enterprise when it comes to the sale of wine and spirits. Beer distributors there are, but there's no such thing as a privately owned wine shop. No wine sales in supermarkets. No competition. Pennsylvania has one wine buyer and one wine seller: the Commonwealth itself. Until the arrival of Mr. Newman, you couldn't buy wine on Sunday. You couldn't find more than a handful of "state store" (as most wine retailers in PA were called) employees who knew the difference between a Cabernet and a Chablis. Choices were limited, access to anything of interest was non-existent, wine lovers drove to Delaware, New Jersey or West Virginia and smuggled contraband back in the trunks of their cars for their own personal consumption, at the risk of confiscation of both said contraband and said cars. It was bad.
Then came Newman. Premium wine shops. In-store tastings. Copies of Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate available to check ratings on your purchases. Cold rooms for more delicate, age-worthy, high priced wines. A searchable web site that allowed you to find out whether you could buy the wine of your choice in Pennsylvania, at which store and at what price. Road trips to Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginia began to diminish. Serious wine lovers began to buy again in Pennsylvania. Slowly, cautiously, optimistically. And then ... Governor Rendell got re-elected.
You can find most of the rest of the story here:
Last month Gov. Ed Rendell named a former state senator, Joe Conti, to the newly created job of chief executive officer of the PLCB. The move came with little public warning and no search process to speak of. It was a classic back room Harrisburg deal.
Oh, and Conti will be earning $150,000 a year for his efforts. Newman, as chairman of the agency, was making just $65,572.
Why Rendell, a Democrat, would create such a plum job for Conti, a Republican, is still a mystery. The administration maintains that Conti, who once oversaw the agency from the Senate, is so uniquely qualified for the job that he would have gotten it whether a national search was performed or not. And the governor's decision is being backed by the other two members of the liquor control board.
Newman isn't buying it. He said he was performing the duties of a CEO and there wasn't any need for the new position. "There was no public discussion about whether the decision to bring in a CEO was appropriate, no national search process to find the best-qualified individual, and no opportunity for public comment or media scrutiny before this rushed decision was completed," Newman said.
A Rendell spokeswoman suggests Newman is just miffed that he didn't get the job. Newman denies that. But the question remains: If the governor decided that the PLCB needed a CEO, why wasn't the job advertised? And why wasn't a guy who brought vast change for the better to the system considered for the post, anyway?
These are damn good questions. I'm hoping the citizens of Pennsylvania are going to start asking them. Some of them obviously already are.
The whole deal stinks. Whatever his motives, the governor handled the matter in a way that reeks of the smoke-filled room of politics-as-usual. Haven't our "public servants" in Harrisburg learned any lessons from the pay-raise debacle and electoral upheaval of the last two years?
Jonathan Newman, it appears, deserved better treatment than he got. And the public, at minimum, deserves a far better explanation about what happened at the PLCB - and why.
Yes, we do. Newman is a public servant. Even after his resignation, he continues in that role. And he's got some questions of his own.
This leads to a suggestion that Mr. Newman included in his message, one that we like, too. He said that since the operations of the nation's largest buyer of wine and liquor, a $1.7 billion business with 4,500 employees were being restructured at the top, it's hard to justify paying the part-time board members at their current levels. A better approach, he said, is to adopt the practice of Oregon and other states with state-run liquor store systems and pay board members only per-diems and expenses for meetings they attend. (That practice also would more closely copy the way private companies compensate outside board members.)
Stay tuned, folks. This one promises to be interesting.
