Ex-Aide Warned Honig About QEP Contracts

A former deputy to state schools chief Bill Honig testified Wednesday that he told his boss it was legal but politically dangerous to authorize several contracts with local school district educators that prosecutors say constitute a criminal conflict of interest.

James R. Smith said he had been told the contracts were legal by state Department of Education attorney Joseph Symkowick, even though the agreements called for public funds to pay educators to work with the Quality Education Project, a nonprofit consulting firm headed by Honig’s wife, Nancy.

“The advice was that the arrangement did not appear to be illegal,” Smith testified.

It was in doubt whether the testimony would help Honig’s case, however, because Superior Court Judge James L. Long excluded the jury during presentation of key elements.

Furthermore, Smith admitted under questioning by Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. George H. Williamson that he did not know at the time the contracts were written that Mrs. Honig received a salary from QEP.

Chief defense attorney Patrick Hallinan attempted to elicit testimony from Smith that he would have considered Mrs. Honig’s salary irrelevant had he known it was paid out of private funds. But Williamson’s objections prevented Hallinan’s questioning.

Despite his belief that the contracts were legal, Smith said he repeatedly and unsuccessfully advised Honig not to authorize the expenditures because he feared political repercussions.

Ruling that allowing Smith’s testimony on that point would violate rules of evidence, Long prohibited the jury from hearing it. But Smith was allowed to tell jurors that he saw no benefit to QEP from the contracts. He went on to testify, however, that he told Honig it was unwise to go ahead with the contracts because of Mrs. Honig’s involvement in QEP.

Smith said Honig ignored his warnings, but asked him if he thought QEP would benefit from the contracts.

“I said as near as I could tell it would be the students and the public and the school districts” who would benefit, Smith said.

Later in the proceedings, the flamboyant Hallinan, frustrated by repeated objections sustained by the judge, angrily demanded a mistrial, alleging that the judge favors the prosecution. Long denied the motion.

Smith was one in a series of prosecution witnesses to trace the history of the contracts that were written between 1986 and 1989 and resulted in Honig’s indictment last March on four counts of conflict of interest.

The prosecution also presented testimony Wednesday by Daniel Rodriguez, who worked as a QEP consultant from 1987 to 1989.

Rodriguez, under questioning by Williamson, said that QEP was in a developmental stage when he joined the organization and that he and other consultants--including those who were paid from public funds--helped formulate QEP’s programs.

Hallinan, in response, hammered away at the witness in an attempt to show that QEP was a viable organization before Rodriguez joined it.

The prosecution hopes to prove that QEP grew and developed as a result of work paid for by public funds and that the organization was thereby able to pay Mrs. Honig a salary of more than $100,000 by 1990 and to charge QEP $1,000 a month rent for office space in the Honigs’ home.

The defense contends that the publicly paid educators worked with QEP, not for it, and that Nancy Honig’s salary came from the money she raised from private sources.

The trial is to continue Friday.

If convicted on all four counts, Honig faces up to five years in prison and removal from the office he has held since 1983.