All Muck is Local: Help Wanted

Ramona Cunningham’s job was to help unemployed Iowans. Instead, she and other executives of the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium (CIETC) are charged with stealing millions of taxpayer dollars targeted toward the effort. That may seem an egregious crime. But really, who better to teach wayward job seekers how to seize opportunity when it comes?

Cunningham was the chief executive officer at CIETC, a non-profit that used to be the primary state-funded job training organization in central Iowa. During its heyday, it ran on millions in federal, state, and local grants. But a state audit in the spring of 2006 revealed that between $1.3 and $1.8 million in taxpayer funds designated to train unemployed Central Iowans were instead used to inflate the salaries and bonuses of the three top CIETC executives. Cunningham’s salary during the 30 months that public money was being pilfered was $795,384, three times that of Iowa’s governor. Four CIETC officials were indicted and two have pleaded guilty.

Besides dipping into public funds, Cunningham went on trips to casinos across the state with favored CIETC employees who drank and gambled during business hours, time they claimed to be working. CIETC workers also skipped all or part of out-of-town training conferences to gamble in Las Vegas, Reno, St. Louis and Kansas City. All of those activities took place during times when government paperwork showed that the employees were working. One employee, who prosecutors characterized as Cunningham’s favorite, made more than 100 workday gambling trips between 2003 and early 2006 (if his co-workers who testified are to be believed). Victor Scaglione said he felt that the trips were kosher because he felt compelled by Cunningham to participate (and don’t good employees always listen to management?). He will serve 16 months in a halfway house and home confinement for lying to the grand jury during its investigation of the misused funds.

The 2006 audit also described a too-close-for-comfort relationship between CIETC and the government agency that was supposed to oversee it, Iowa Workforce Development. And it seems that while CIETC workers enjoy gambling, IWD workers enjoy dumping boxes of potentially incriminating documents in the trash at 4:30 in the morning.

One month after The Des Moines Register reported that Cunningham’s precipitous fall had led her to a job in a Farmerville, LA nursing home, while living in a house owned by fellow CIETC defendant Dan Albritton (she faced foreclosure on her home because of more than $7,500 in missed mortgage payments), she reportedly attempted suicide. The account was challenged by Cunningham’s neighbor, who was convinced that Cunningham was “too happy to be depressed” and that her hospitalization was actually for pneumonia, but the AP reported that doctors judged it a suicide attempt.

The suicide attempt, real or not, may not draw the judge’s sympathy. Judge Ronald E. Longstaff already declined to postpone a November hearing because Cunningham’s lawyer, William Kutmus, said he could not contact his client, who was in 24-hour care at a mental hospital. Now Kutmus is saying Cunningham is currently mentally incompetent to stand trial for 30 counts of various forms of fraud, conspiracy and obstruction, scheduled for February 2007. A hearing is scheduled for December 17th.