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Liquor board in need of oversight

By Staff | May 5, 2013

The argument that New Hampshire needs a totally independent and unfettered liquor commission got a whole lot tougher to make last week as the soap opera about the awarding a $200 million, 20-year state liquor warehousing contract played itself out in Hillsborough County Superior Court.

This week’s court proceedings were to determine if an injunction to stop the contract implementation should be issued before the entire lawsuit is resolved.

Stacked on one side of the debate were former liquor Commissioner Mark Bodi and former head of the state’s liquor enforcement division Eddie Edwards. They provided sworn depositions that the two other liquor commissioners were biased against Law Warehouses, the Nashua company that had held the state contract for more than 20 years.

According to Edwards, there was an “energy” among the commissioners and staff that the warehouse contract should go to someone else because Brian Law, owner of Law Warehouses, had an attitude of entitlement.

“I just thought from an ethical standpoint it was inappropriate to have people on this review committee that had these kind of thoughts and conversations and guidance,” Edwards said. He told liquor commission officials to stop the bidding process and restart it under a third party’s oversight because “you are not being fair to Brian Law or anyone else in the process.”

“They did not believe that Brian Law was worthy of the contract and that the liquor commission should not award it to him,” Bodi said.

Lawyers for the state painted Bodi and Edwards as bitter former employees whose statements were contradicted by the current liquor commissioners, as well as a long list of staff members.

Bodi resigned from the commission last summer after being stripped of the chairmanship in 2011. He was described by Senior Assistant Attorney General Mary Ann Dempsey as disruptive and rude. Edwards left on poor terms as well, Dempsey said, after signing a settlement agreement with the Attorney General’s Office.

“The two individuals are the two most disgruntled employees with the liquor commission,” Dempsey said.

No one should lose sight of the fact that a big reason all of this is going on is because the warehouse contract was negotiated in secret without open review or debate. Until a couple of years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case because the deal would have passed through the Executive Council, which would have discussed and voted on it in public.

That went away with passage of the Liquor Commission Modernization Act of 2009, a set of reforms born out of frustration that the state wasn’t generating sufficient liquor revenues because too many rules and regulations were preventing the commission from being sufficiently nimble to run like a true business.

The big problem is that nearly all the state has to show for its modernization efforts is something between Theater of the Absurd and the Keystone Cops.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter whether Bodi and Edwards are telling the truth. What’s important is that we are in this mess at all, and it’s time for the state to do whatever it takes to keep it from happening again.

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