Hayden Launches Investigation of Lake Program : Environment: The state senator will undertake his own probe of contracts awarded to a politically connected businessman whose work was not inspected.

A key legislator Tuesday launched his own inquiry into a Department of Fish and Game decision to award nearly all the contracts for a lake restoration program to a businessman who has connections to a powerful legislator and a top official in the Wilson Administration.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, asked the department for immediate explanations for of its actions surrounding the problem-plagued Adopt a Lake program, which is being investigated by the attorney general’s office and audited by the agency.

Citing an article Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times, Hayden said he wanted to know why the department continued to give contracts to a nonprofit company operated by Fresno businessman Byron Kemmer even after state officials had received complaints that it was not completing its work.

“Given the department’s responsibility to administer contracts, how did the department allow only four of 16 contracts awarded to Mr. Kemmer to be completed?” Hayden asked in a letter to Fish and Game Director Boyd Gibbons.

Adopt a Lake had met few of its original goals to restore bass habitat and had been undermined by politics and mismanagement, The Times found.

State Sen. Jim Costa (D-Hanford) and his aides, as well as Craig Schmidt, a special assistant to Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler, had intervened on numerous occasions to help Kemmer with problems he was having with agency officials, according to records and interviews. Kemmer is a friend of both the senator and Schmidt.

Hayden asked the department to enumerate the times Schmidt had contacted officials on Kemmer’s behalf and to disclose the extent to which either legislators or state administrators had lobbied the agency for the Fresno businessman.

The Times also found that the department had violated its own procedures by allowing Kemmer’s organization to be paid thousands of dollars without inspecting to see if the work it was paying for had been done.

Whether that work has been completed is one subject of the auditor’s investigation.

Kemmer has denied any wrongdoing and maintained that his work for the state was exemplary, but said that bureaucratic red tape impeded his efforts. Both Schmidt and Costa have disputed the characterization of their involvement as “intervention,” saying they were only trying to help a constituent.

Hayden, whose committee oversees the Fish and Game Department, said he found the Times report troubling and wanted to find out if “we have some political back scratching at work here that weakens Fish and Game’s ability to do its oversight and improve these lakes.”

He said the answers provided by the department would tell him if he needs to hold public hearings to allow bass fishermen “to ask questions about whether these lakes really had any significant improvements made or whether the money went elsewhere, and if so, where.”

Jeff Weir, a spokesman for the department, said it would cooperate with the senator “as fully as possible.”

He said Gibbons “is just as disturbed as Sen. Hayden by all of the allegations.” The questions Hayden is asking, he said, “are the very things that the auditor and the attorney general are investigating.”