A Fateful Voyage for Bill Weimar?

Lisa Demer from the Anchorage Daily News reports this morning about Alaska privatized corrections ex-mogul Bill Weimar reporting to prison for his six-month sentence.

Instead of Sheridan, Oregon, where he could possibly have bunked with one of the former recipients of his campaign financing largesse, Vic Kohring -- Pete Kott, Weimar will be reporting to a minimum security facility near Tucson, Arizona. Just in time for mid-winter.

As I wrote when Bill's plea bargain deal emerged, I worked for Bill during a period of expansion in the privatized corrections industry in Alaska, and nationwide. Bill, more clearly than his initial business partners in Allvest, saw the opportunities. The company's name, according to one ground-floor Weimar partner, Kevin Bruce, came from the term "we all invest."

Bruce left work as an assistant commissioner of corrections in the Bill Sheffield administration to help Weimar and other investors open the Cordova Center, which is still the state's most important halfway house, almost 24 years later. When I started working for Allvest, Weimar was finishing law school back east, and Bruce was functioning like an acting CEO. Kevin was one of the few to closely embrace Weimar in a business deal and walk away smiling. When I asked Kevin why he was moving on, he airily replied that Bill had "too many scruples." I took it to be snark.

Bruce had helped Weimar's rise during the late 80s. It was a time when more than a few Anchorage and Alaska business people fell.

The 80s had begun with Pete Zamarillo bragging to me that he was now worth well over $10 million, surpassing - in Pete's mind, at least - the wealth of Wally Hickel, the Gottsteins or Elmer. I didn't know whether to believe Pete or not, as he and I observed a crew unloading new windows to be placed in Whittier's Buckner Building, which Pete had just bought. Many of Pete's plans never achieved fruition, like the plan to turn the Buckner Building into a prison. Thank God. It would have been cruel and unusual punishment.

The 80s closed with Zamarello becoming a footnote to Alaska development history.

The person most responsible for economic growth in Southcentral Alaska at the end of that decade was Joseph Hazelwood. At least two of the major figures in the ongoing Department of Justice investigations into Alaska political and business corruption owe a lot of their rise to Hazelwood: Bill Allen and Bill Weimar.

Weimar and his partners had already started Allvest Laboratory when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef. What had been a fairly small urinalysis sampling service grew rapidly in the 1990-91 series of measures I call the "post-Hazelwood reforms." The expansion possibilities became so overwhelming in early 1991, I was called away from my regular post as Program Coordinator of the Cordova Center, to help Matt Fagnani, Allvest Lab's then-director, conduct educational programs among crews of the Alaska Marine Highway System in Alaska, Washington and Oregon.

Few people outside the merchant marine realize how profoundly Hazelwood's misconduct changed their profession. And subsequent drug test requirements throughout the transportation industry owe the skipper of the Exxon Valdez their thanks for more stringent standards, which have probably saved hundreds of lives, if not thousands. There's a bit of irony there, I'm sure.

Teaching merchant mariners how to get their shipmates to piss into little bottles while they are being closely observed was even more difficult than teaching them how not to screw up the chain of custody paperwork that makes the sample valid. Essentially, what the post-Hazelwood reforms forced upon this industry, where crew-mates become family during weeks or months at sea, broke into that family structure. It was like telling these people to throw their traditions of trust and judgement out the porthole.

My background in the maritime industry, marina administration and commercial fishing helped me get the message across to these crews, but it was an uncomfortable teaching job, and I was glad to get back to work at the Cordova Center after the stint was over.

Looking through some of the comments to Lisa Demer's story on Bill this morning, there apprear to be people holding Weimar responsible for the effect of the post-Hazelwood reforms on the transportation industry - taxi cabs, dump trucks, garbage trucks, and so on. But one commenter, responding to a taxi driver complaint, sums it up pretty much the way I had to explain it to the mariners in 1991:

If your employer requires drug testing you can choose not to take the test. All you need to do is find a new employer. Pretty simple. If a govermental [sic] regulating agency makes drug test manadatory [sic] for taxi drivers they have a choice. They can either take the test or find a new job. Nothing illegal about that.

Another commenter points out that police, judges and politicians don't have to take drug tests. (Matanuska Electrical Association board members do, though.)

Should our politicians have to be UA'd to take office?

Update from the comments: Evil Monkey said...

Correction: He could have bunked with Tom Anderson or Pete Kott in Sheridan. To snuggle with Vic Khoring, he would have had to visit Taft, California.