California Insider

Kimberly Kindy of the Orange County Register, using old-fashioned reporting, has exposed widespread deception by the state Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency. Like many state programs, the agency routinely boasts that a dollar spent on its efforts – in this case foreign trade offices – will yield far more in benefits to the taxpayer. To back up its claim, the agency submitted lists of private business deals supposedly brokered by its offices on behalf of California-based companies. Kindy took the list of 191 “success stories” from 2000-2001 and started contacting them. Of the 58 business owners or managers who would talk to the paper, 31 said the state had little or nothing to do with the deals. Fourteen other companies acknowledged that the state played a role but said it was not pivotal. Six said the deals the state took credit for never even happened. Agency spokesmen say their errors were the result of misunderstandings, or of comments gathered from surveys with firms with which they’d dealt. But this blunder has all the looks of willful sloppiness. As the information moved up the chain of command from the trade offices to the agency secretary, there was no system for even spot-checking the claims for accuracy. Of course not. The more deals the agency could take credit for, the more it could expand its empire of trade offices, which in reality are little more than a system for governors to appoint state “ambassadors” to cushy jobs in foreign locales. The phony reports from Trade and Commerce certainly leave you wondering how many other state agencies are doctoring their data.

A note on Kindy, a disclosure, and a boast: As far as I know, Kindy remains the only reporter in the Capitol press corps assigned full-time to investigate the operations of state government. She began her assignment about three years ago, dedicated at first to covering the government agencies but not designated formally as a full-time investigative reporter. A few months later, when the Register revamped and strengthened its commitment to investigations throughout the paper, Kindy was given that role officially in the Capitol bureau. Since then, she has broken story after story on her beat and established herself as the top digger in the Capitol press corps. This past year she won the John Jacobs Award for enterprise reporting in the Capitol from the Center for California Studies at Cal State University Sacramento. Keep in mind that the Register has only three staffers in Sacramento. But the paper has dedicated one-third of its Capitol staff to delving into how state government is actually working, or not working, for the people of California. If every other paper in the state gave investigations as much weight, you would be reading stories like this one every week, if not every day. Now for the boast: Kindy began her current assignment shortly before I departed as her bureau chief at the Register to become a columnist for the Bee. I take zero credit for her success. But I do take pride in pushing the concept that every Capitol bureau, no matter what its size, should have at least one reporter doing nothing but investigations. As a reporter and later a bureau chief, I was always frustrated by how much time we all spent chasing the politicians around, often to little effect. The real stories, I thought, were buried deep (some not so deep) within the bowels of government. Kindy has shown what one dogged reporter with a focused assignment can accomplish. Let’s unleash 10 or 15 more just like her.