This Saturday, the Republican Party of Arkansas will vote to select, among other things, a new national committeeman. The two leading candidates for the position are Fourth Congressional District Republican Party Chairman Eddie Arnold and Arkansas Public Service Commission Chair Doyle Webb.
Given Webb’s résumé – among other things, he has been Arkansas Republican Party chair, and a state senator, and he is currently chairman of the Arkansas Public Service Commission – this race should not be close. Yet, by most accounts, the race between Arnold and Webb is a toss-up, and the reason largely boils down to Webb’s long-documented unwillingness to adhere to basic ethics when he’s put in a position of power.
Webb’s ethical failings spilling over into his wife’s campaign for Arkansas certainly won’t help his candidacy, either.
When Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed Webb as Public Service Commission chairman in January of last year, one area of concern for many folks was Webb’s spotty ethical history when given access to other people’s money. After he sent a text message to potential supporters in June, soliciting pledges of financial support for his wife — Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Barbara Webb — to run for chief justice, concerns about his tendency to play fast and loose with ethical rules surfaced again. (It did Webb no favors that his text message was sent nearly three months before Justice Webb could begin fundraising under judicial campaign rules.)
Between when she announced her candidacy for chief justice in late July and the March 5 judicial elections, Justice Webb raised just over $160,000. Of that total, only $4,100 (or 2.6%) came from individuals or PACs with ties to the energy industry, and there were only five such donations. This makes complete sense.
As part of the PSC board, Webb is prohibited from using his position to benefit himself or his spouse under Arkansas law. Violation of that prohibition is potentially a misdemeanor, and the law allows for a citizen to pursue relief if a prosecutor won’t. The PSC’s code of ethics puts it even more clearly: “No employee of the Arkansas Public Service Commission will use his or her position with the Commission for personal benefit or for the personal benefit of his or her family or friends.”
Additionally, as a judicial candidate, Justice Webb was not allowed to solicit campaign contributions other than through her campaign committee, nor could she let someone else do that for her. She was also prohibited from any campaign activities that might call her integrity into question.
So avoiding a lot of energy-related contributions that could give rise to an appearance of impropriety was simply a good idea by both Webbs.
On September 29, according to her third-quarter finance report, Justice Webb allegedly loaned her campaign $50,000. (Why she felt the need to loan money to her campaign at that point is unclear. As of the date of the loan, she had already raised $53,500 and spent only $1,267, leaving her with more than $52,000 cash-on-hand at that point. The filing period was still more than a month away, and her $13,200 filing fee was not due until she filed.)
By the time her campaign ended on March 5, Justice Webb was just over $4,000 in the hole. That amount, plus the earlier loan, left her with a little more than $54,000 in campaign debt.
Candidates who have campaign debt are allowed to hold fundraisers and solicit contributions to get their campaign account back into the black. Typically, such candidates reach out to people who have already donated to the campaign previously, since that tends to be the easiest sell when asking people for money after an election is over. Justice Webb’s April 29 campaign finance report, however, is anything but typical.
From March 27 through April 29, Webb reports raising $26,900 to retire her campaign debt. Of that, $14,800 (more than 55%) came from people and PACs with clear, direct ties to the energy industry.
Of the total, $8,500 came from people employed by Entergy, including $1,000 from Entergy’s Chairman and CEO, Andrew Marsh. Another $2,000 came from Entergy’s PAC. Webb received $3,300, split across two donations, from Arkansas for Rural Development, the PAC for Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. and Arkansas Electric Cooperatives, Inc. Bi-Partisan Strategies’ PAC, which is almost entirely funded by a different Arkansas Electric Cooperatives PAC, gave another $1,000.
Of the money raised for “debt retirement,” $22,828.49 (nearly 85%) went to Barbara and Doyle Webb for repayment of the loan she made to her campaign.
Strangely, though she included the repayment amount in the expenditure total on her final report, Justice Webb did not actually list the payment to herself as an itemized expenditure. Only by looking at all of her reports would someone figure out that the nearly $23,000 expenditure went to Justice Webb.
It is not hard to deduce why Entergy might have been gung-ho to give money to Justice Webb, despite her finishing third in a three-person race.
After all, the justice’s husband had been chair of the Public Service Commission for less than a year when the commission suddenly accepted a nearly identical $142 million settlement offer they had rejected barely 15 months earlier as “a low-ball amount.” That settlement, which came in a long-running dispute over Entergy’s operation and management of the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant, left about $276 million on the table compared to what Arkansas could have recovered at trial, according to experts. That’s money Entergy might have had to pay, but didn’t.
Worse still, Mississippi, which had less of a claim to the total potential recovery in that suit than Arkansas did, settled their share of the litigation in June 2022 for $300 million. Explaining the difference between Arkansas’s settlement and Mississippi’s last December, we wrote:
Arkansas’s $142 million settlement, on the other hand, equates to just over a third of what the state could have received at trial. In other words, if Arkansas’s settlement had simply matched Mississippi’s in terms of percentage of each state’s potential trial recovery, Arkansas would have received $326 million. The Arkansas Public Service Commission accepted less than half of that amount.
Arkansas’s settlement looks even worse now, barely six months later.
In April, the City of New Orleans settled their claims against Entergy for more than $250 million. This is divided into $116 million directly tied to the Grand Gulf litigation above, plus $138 million to settle a dispute related to an IRS audit of Entergy’s returns from 2016 through 2018. Unlike New Orleans’ settlement, though, Arkansas’s $142 million settlement also resolved any claims Arkansas might have had for additional money related to that audit.
Asking Entergy why some of their highest-ranking employees gave to Justice Webb after the election yielded little information to go on.
In response to an email to Marcus Brown, Entergy’s executive vice president and general counsel, seeking to ask him a few questions about his $1,000 donation to Justice Webb, a spokesperson for Entergy Arkansas responded:
A number of Entergy employees have known and respected Justice Webb for a long time. Let me know if you have specific questions.
To be clear, Brown lives and works in the New Orleans area for Entergy’s main company. Yet, before he even knew what the questions about his donation were, he forwarded it to Entergy Arkansas and had Kacee Kirschvink, communications director for the subsidiary, respond.
A follow up to Kirschvink to find out who contacted Brown and other Entergy employees about donating and how that contact was made yielded the following response:
Entergy Arkansas has a long history of supporting candidates for elected office that they know and respect. That history includes supporting Barbara Webb for election as an associate justice to the Arkansas Supreme Court in 2020, and in her bid to become the Chief Justice in 2024. In fact, some members of the Entergy Arkansas team have known and respected Barbara for over 30 years, including when she was elected as one of the state’s first female prosecuting attorneys in 1997.
Entergy Arkansas team members reached out to Mr. Brown and asked him to support her candidacy. As a senior leader for Entergy Corporation, he often supports state and federal candidates. All contributions from Entergy employees resulted from members of the Entergy Arkansas team seeking support for her campaign, based on their knowing her and respecting her years of public service.
We still have questions. If Justice Webb is respected by Entergy employees and officials and they have given to her previous campaigns, then why did almost none of them give to her during her actual campaign this time, when the money could have been used to try to win her primary, rather than waiting until her race was over and she was just trying to pay down debt?
Similarly, if Entergy Arkansas team members were so fired up about Justice Webb after she lost that they were reaching out to corporate executives in New Orleans to encourage donations, where was that enthusiasm prior to the election?
Ultimately, considering Entergy’s documented record of either not knowing what their employees were doing or knowing and then lying to try to cover it up, their answers about contributions to Justice Webb should be taken with a grain of salt.
The Republican National Committeeman position Webb is seeking is politically important. The RNC includes three members from each state: the state party chair, the state’s national committeeman and the state’s national committeewoman. Getting one of those positions provides a great deal of access in political circles.
Every Arkansan, even those who aren’t Republicans, should hope the party’s leaders will not reward Webb’s decades of ethical lapses and self-dealing with such a position.