Baker gives up job as UCA executive

CONWAY - Former state Sen. Gilbert Baker resigned Wednesday from his executive job at the University of Central Arkansas shortly after an article detailed his connections to some of the officers whose names appeared on political action committees tied to two state investigations of Circuit Judge Michael Maggio.

Later in the day, the Little Rock lawyer who created the PACs said he had withdrawn his representation of the unidentified, longtime client who told him to form the committees.

Attorney Chris Stewart also distanced himself from Maggio, as well as PAC financier and nursing-home tycoon Michael Morton, and said he was shutting down the PACs.

Checks totaling thousands of dollars from Morton or his businesses to the eight PACs were dated July 8, according to Stewart, who earlier this week amended committee reports filed with the state to reflect the dates that Stewart said the committees actually accepted the money.

July 8 is the same day that Maggio heard a plea from the Morton-owned Greenbrier Nursing and Rehabilitation Center to lower a Faulkner County jury’s $5.2 million judgment in a negligence lawsuit against the facility. Three days later, Maggio, who then was running for a seat on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, lowered the judgment sum to $1 million in the 2008 death of patient Martha Bull, 76.

As of Dec. 31, seven of the eight PACs had given money to Maggio, who has since withdrawn from the appeals court race, and six of them had given to him almost exclusively.

Baker, 57, resigned from his $132,000-a-year position as executive assistant to UCA President Tom Courtway before the UCA board gathered Wednesday for a retreat in Mountain View, where trustees held an already scheduled executive session to discuss personnel. The trustees took no action during that session.

Baker’s resignation followed an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article that quoted Don Thomas, a former paid political consultant to Baker, as saying he knew nothing about the political action committees.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Baker - a former chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party and candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2012 - remained a tenured professor of music at UCA, where he had taught years ago, university spokesman Fredricka Sharkey said.

“A determination of his salary as a nine-month faculty member has not been made,” Sharkey said in an email.

UCA issued a one-sentence statement announcing that Baker’s resignation was effective Wednesday. Courtway said he had no additional comment, other than to confirm that Baker has tenure.

Baker did not return phone or email messages seeking comment Wednesday afternoon. On Tuesday, he declined to answer written questions, including whether he was the person who had sought the formation of the PACs and whether he had solicited officers for them.

In a statement emailed to the Democrat-Gazette late Wednesday, Stewart wrote, “My client indicated to me that he had the approval of all those persons to be listed as officers.

“When I learned that three of the persons that were named as officers of the PACs stated that they were unaware of their names being involved, I was shocked,” said Stewart, who did not identify the client because of attorney-client confidentiality. “I trusted that my client’s statements and directions to me were accurate.”

Stewart’s statement said he had withdrawn from representing the PAC client and the client’s company “because of several factors.”

Stewart added: “It is critical for me to again declare that I never solicited anyone to donate money to the PACs;I never met Judge Maggio, appeared before his Court as an attorney, and have never spoken to him; I have never met Mr. Michael Morton and have never had any contact with him; I never directed that any of the funds from those PACs should be donated to Judge Maggio’s campaign: and I was completely unaware of a lawsuit involving a nursing home.

“In order to separate myself and my law firm from matters that I had and now have no control over, I am in the process of officially closing down the PACs that were set up for that client and therefore removing my name as agent. Any remaining funds in those PACs will be dutifully returned to the contributors.”

Wednesday’s developments came as the newspaper learned that Stewart had amended the PACs’ third-quarter reports for 2013 on Monday and had amended two of the PACs’ registration forms on Tuesday to remove the names of two people previously listed as officers - former Faulkner County Justice of the Peace Ancil Lea of Conway and Cheryl Loetscher, whose place of employment on the original forms was listed as Thomas’ The Thomas Group.

The Thomas Group has an office beside Baker’s private office in Conway’s Tyler Plaza on Hogan Lane.

Stewart said he removed the names of Lea and Loetscher at their instruction. The original registration forms filed with the secretary of state’s office had listed Loetscher’s surname as Loechter, but a relative contacted by phone said the correct spelling was Loetscher.

Each PAC’s original report had said Morton or his businesses made contributions on July 8. The amended forms for seven PACs - those registered on July 31 - now give the contributions date as July 19. The amendment filed for the one PAC that wasn’t registered until Aug. 6, the D. Bruce Hawkins 2 PAC, changed the contribution date to Aug. 2 instead of July 8.

The Arkansas Ethics Commission, in agreeing to investigate the contributions, has cited Arkansas Code Annotated 7-6-215. It says in part, “To qualify as an approved political action committee, the political action committee shall register with the Secretary of State within fifteen … days after accepting contributions during a calendar year that exceed … [$500] in the aggregate.”

The revised dates make the gap between contribution dates and registration dates fewer than 15 days.

Stewart said in his email that “the date of the reception of the funds from the contributors was inadvertently listed as the same date that appeared [on] the checks.”

Ethics Commission Director Graham Sloan said Wednesday that he did not ask Stewart to amend the PACs’ contribution dates. Sloan said, however, that a contribution date should, in fact, reflect the date that a check was accepted, not the date a check was written.

After a person or a PAC receives a check, Sloan said, the recipient has five business days to decide if he is accepting it. Depositing the check amounts to acceptance, he said.

The recipient “can’t hang on to [a check] and deposit it” after the five-day limit and thereby delay the legal acceptance date indefinitely, Sloan said. “If you don’t send it back, you’re deemed to have accepted it.”

Sloan acknowledged that, to some degree, the state has to rely on the recipient’s word as to when the payment arrived in the mail or when it was hand-delivered.

Stewart did not change the date on a non-Morton contribution to one of the PACs. The Conway County Legal Beverage Association is still listed as giving $5,000 to the D. Bruce Hawkins 2 PAC on Sept. 19.

The Arkansas Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission also is investigating allegations regarding Maggio and the PAC contributions, as well as online comments that Maggio made about a range of topics, including women, sex, bestiality and race.

The Arkansas Supreme Court has stripped Maggio of all of his cases pending further notification.

Morton did not return phone messages seeking comment Wednesday. Morton has previously said Linda Leigh Flanagin, whom Baker hired to work for LRM Consulting Inc., asked him to support Maggio’s campaign while Maggio was presiding over the nursing-home case. Morton has said he did nothing illegal.

Baker has previously said he did not ask or tell Flanagin to seek Morton’s support and did not know of the conversation between her and Morton. Baker removed his name from LRM Consulting’s incorporation document last month at Courtway’s instruction.

Flanagin has not returned repeated phone messages.

Maggio did not reply to phone and email messages seeking comment Wednesday.