Four Darr employees to resign posts June 30

The four employees in the lieutenant governor’s office are resigning, effective June 30, Senate President Pro Tempore Michael Lamoureux, R-Russellville, said Monday.

Lamoureux said the office’s four employees surprised him Monday afternoon by informing him that they decided over the weekend to step down, effective at the end of the fiscal year. He said he didn’t seek their resignations.

They decided it’s in their best interest professionally and for the state for them to do so, he said.

“I think they just want to move on with their lives,” Lamoureux said.

“I think this was probably where we would have ended up anyway [by June 30],” he said, because the employees would have left by then to take other jobs. They won’t be getting severance packages, he added.

The employees in the lieutenant governor’s office and their annual salaries are Chief of Staff Bruce Campbell, $75,132; Communications Director Amber Pool, $57,564; Director of Governmental Relations Josh Curtis, $51,564; and Executive Assistant Raeanne Gardner, $33,660.

Asked for comment, Campbell - a former employee for the state Senate and former director of the state Department of Rural Services under Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee - referred questions about the lieutenant governor office’s employees to Lamoureux.

Lamoureux announced the resignations four days after he intervened to stop legislators from cutting funding for most of the positions, effective July 1.

At the request of Lamoureux, the Joint Budget Committee’s Special Language Subcommittee on Thursday expunged an earlier vote to limit spending on the office’s employee salaries and benefits to $52,000 during the final six months of this year.

Lamoureux said then that he preferred “the status quo,” adding, “I think we ought to just ride it out and elect a new person and let the office operate the way it’s supposed to operate.”

Sen. Bruce Maloch, D-Magnolia, had proposed the spending limits in an amendment to an appropriations bill for the lieutenant governor’s office.

Maloch said Monday afternoon that the resignations of these four employees, effective June 30, are “the right thing to do.”

He said he learned about them from Lamoureux’s announcement on Twitter.

Darr resigned Feb. 1 after being fined $11,000 for 11 violations of state ethics laws and regulations. Gov. Mike Beebe, the entire congressional delegation and numerous other officials had urged Darr to quit, and his opponents were preparing impeachment proceedings if he did not step down.

Lamoureux had said he’s the employees’ supervisor while the post remains vacant. Democratic Attorney General Dustin McDaniel disagreed, saying Lamoureux was misinterpreting the law and doesn’t have the authority to oversee Darr’s former staff.

Beebe has said he’ll sign legislation to allow him to forgo calling a special election for lieutenant governor this year if the Legislature sends him the bill. The measure already has cleared the Senate.

There is precedent for keeping staff members in the lieutenant governor’s office during an extended vacancy. After Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller died in July 2006, his aides were allowed to continue working for the rest of his term, which ended in January 2007.