Lawmaker Tried To Keep Findings Sealed
BYLINE: TONY DORIS, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
DATE: April 22, 2007 PUBLICATION: The Palm Beach Post
EDITION: FINAL SECTION: A SECTION
PAGE: 1A MEMO: Did not run MSL.
For the past two months, a state lawmaker has waged a secret legal battle to keep her name out of a grand jury’s report about “pay to play” city politics.
State Rep. Mary Brandenburg, Read More………
a mayoral appointee, to the city’s ethics task force who testified before the grand jury, has all but run out of motions in Palm Beach County Circuit Court to keep a redacted portion of the report from public view. Chief Circuit Judge Kathleen Kroll could release the sealed findings in as little as 30 days unless Brandenburg challenges the judge’s decision with the 4th District Court of Appeal. Brandenburg, D-West Palm Beach, maintained she wanted to delay its release only to avoid a distraction to her work in Tallahassee during the legislative session, scheduled to end May 4. “I am confident that I will not have any problems with doing anything that was illegal or that breaks any rules of the Florida House,” she said.
Brandenburg said last week that she hadn’t decided whether to appeal Kroll’s decision to release the findings: “I’ve been making decisions about what to do next one step at a time.”
Brandenburg’s motions were filed under seal to protect grand jury secrecy. Other than to confirm she filed them, she would not discuss specifics. Kroll would acknowledge only that motions were filed with her, but would not say who filed them and would not talk about their contents.
Under the law, any portion of a grand jury report relating to an individual who has not been charged is kept secret until the individual has been furnished a copy and given 15 days to file motions to repress or expunge any portion that the individual believes is improper or unlawful. Any such motion, whether granted or denied, automatically seals that portion of a report until the circuit court rules on the motion or until an appeal of that ruling is affirmed or denied.
The grand jury report, released Feb. 2, blasted the city for what developers saw as a “pay to play” culture in which campaign contributions are used as political capital timed to coincide with official city action on projects. Grand jurors focused on Mayor Lois Frankel’s $400,000 in contributions for her reelection campaign, most of them from development interests. Such campaign accounts drown out the voices of small businesses and regular people, their report said.
While the grand jury found no criminal activity, “the contributions were consistent with the perception of the ‘pay to play‘ atmosphere made in the hopes of receiving favorable consideration,” the report said.
The sealed portion elaborates on a section subtitled “Mayor’s Ethics Committee,” concerning a panel handpicked by Frankel. “Based on the credible evidence and credible testimony before it, this grand jury concludes that one member of the ethics committee acted unethically while conducting ethics committee business,” the section states. Details, it continued, were contained in the section still under seal.
After the grand jury report was released, it was widely speculated that Brandenburg was named in the sealed section. For months, Brandenburg had avoided questions about her inclusion in the report.
Questions about her advice
Brandenburg, 57, was elected to the Florida House in 2002, eight months after she lost reelection as a city commissioner to Kimberly Mitchell. She remains on the city’s 10-member ethics panel, which was formed by the mayor last summer to restore public confidence in city government after City Commissioner Ray Liberti resigned amid a federal corruption probe.
What little was known about Brandenburg’s involvement with the grand jury came from the legislator herself, shortly after she testified before the grand jury in January. At the time, she said she was quizzed about advice she had given to Carl Flick, head of a nonprofit company having trouble getting city approvals for a redevelopment project in the city’s Northwood neighborhood.
Brandenburg said she told Flick in July that he needed to try to generate “goodwill” — and that “one way he could do it was to donate campaign contributions to anybody who was running in March,” Brandenburg said. That included Frankel and Commissioners Ike Robinson and Jeri Muoio, who all won.
“I’m a politician, and we politicians notice who gives campaign contributions and are inclined to think benevolently of those people,” she said in a January interview.
Recent interviews with Brandenburg, Flick and three of Flick’s business associates revealed that the legislator was under far more scrutiny than previously known.
Brandenburg said last week that the grand jury had subpoenaed phone records and e-mails from her state office in addition to seeking testimony from her two aides. The subpoenaed documents included an Oct. 6 e-mail from Brandenburg to an aide, directing her to set up a meeting with Flick and the mayor. The e-mail was written three days after the grand jury was seated and 11 days before Flick and his associates were to testify.
“The meeting is for Lois, Carl and me, and no one else,” Brandenburg wrote. “I don’t want a crowd.”
‘Shockingly unethical’ talk
That meeting never took place. But at the July 12 meeting, Brandenburg was much more pointed in her recommendation that they make campaign contributions to Frankel, according to Flick and his associates in the nonprofit, Northwood Renaissance.
Donna Brosemer, a Northwood Renaissance lobbyist, said she found the recommendation “shockingly unethical.”
“I’ve worked in political campaigns for 15 years,” Brosemer said. “I’ve heard lots of requests for political contributions. But I’ve never heard a conversation like the one we were in.”
In separate interviews, Flick, Brosemer, Northwood Renaissance board member Terry Fox and Executive Director Terri Murray said Brandenburg was invited to meet with them after they learned she had been picked for the city’s ethics task force. They said they hoped the panel would address city problems they faced while seeking approvals for their Village Center mixed-use development.
All four said Brandenburg dismissed their concerns. Instead, they said, she advised them to make a “significant” contribution to the mayor’s reelection campaign. If they didn’t, she suggested they might as well sell the Village Center site because they never would get project approvals from the city, Fox and Murray said.
Brandenburg, the group said, offered to set up a meeting with Frankel and Flick to repair the group’s rocky relationship with city hall. “We were an outsider and we needed to be an insider; those were the key words,” Fox said.
In an interview Monday, Brandenburg said she was “flabbergasted” by the group’s account. “I went up to their offices as a response to a request for advice to someone outside my district, out of the goodness of my heart,” she said. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Brandenburg and the group agree that no meeting between Flick and the mayor ever took place. Brandenburg says she didn’t reach out again to Flick until Oct. 6, when she sent the e-mail instructing aide Nicole Williams to call him and schedule the meeting contemplated in July.
By the time Flick got the call, the grand jury investigation was gathering steam, with Flick and his colleagues scheduled to testify Oct. 17. The e-mail was written on the same day The Palm Beach Post quoted City Attorney Claudia McKenna as saying the grand jury was “looking at whether you have to pay to play.” McKenna made that comment after speaking with State Attorney Barry Krischer and shortly before she testified to the grand jury.
Brandenburg said she didn’t know why she waited so long to contact Flick, but maintained the news story had nothing to do with it. She said she first asked her aide to make the call a few days earlier and was only following up in the Oct. 6 e-mail.
Flick said he called state attorney’s office investigator Mike Waites after receiving the phone message from Brandenburg’s aide.
“You need to avoid talking to Mary, because she could then be charged with witness tampering,” Flick quoted Waites as telling him. “She should not be talking to you. You’re now a witness to this whole thing.”
Waites declined comment.
Brandenburg said she had no idea Flick or the others were about to testify. She said she wanted the meeting limited to three people because Flick thought the mayor had a grudge against him, so Brandenburg wanted “to hold his hand” through the meeting. Having him show up with other board members would have lengthened the meeting, she said.
Frankel confirmed Wednesday that Brandenburg had told her at some point that Flick wanted to meet, and that the mayor agreed to it.
But the mayor added, “Mary Brandenburg was never asked to solicit contributions for me.”
Frankel described Brandenburg as a political colleague but not a close friend. She never asked Brandenburg to pressure Northwood Renaissance to sell its property, Frankel added, saying she could not believe Brandenburg would do such a thing.
“I’d be so shocked,” Frankel said, “I’d fall off my chair.”
~ tony_doris@pbpost.com