The Iowa State University Foundation has spent more than $1.1 million to buy out the contracts of two Foundation presidents fired by university President Steve Leath.
The two men were fired for no cause — other than the fact that Leath apparently didn’t like them. Both raised millions for the university and were widely admired by their colleagues.
Documents obtained by Cityview under the Freedom of Information Act show that the foundation paid at least $760,000 to Dan Saftig and about $340,000 to his successor, Roger Neuhaus.
Saftig was fired March 11, 2012, just two months after Leath became head of the university. Saftig had headed the foundation since 2003. He was heavily relied on by President Greg Geoffroy, who after Saftig’s firing called him “the absolute best fund-raising professional I know [and] a great leader.”
Leath apparently had a dissenting view. Saftig accompanied the new president and his wife on a fund-raising trip early in 2012, and at the time an ISU person told Cityview that the Leaths didn’t feel they were treated with the respect they believed was due them. Weeks later, the foundation president was fired.
Saftig was replaced by Roger Neuhaus, who started work in January of 2013 and built on the success posted under Saftig and worked to restore the morale that had been damaged by the firing of Saftig. The foundation raised more than $100 million in 2013 and again in 2014, but Neuhaus was unceremoniously dumped in March of 2015.
Neuhaus’s “separation agreement” bars him from saying anything “disparaging or detrimental in any respect to the reputation or goodwill” of the university. Nor can the university or any of its employees say anything bad about him, according to the agreement.
But people close to the university say Leath and Neuhaus slowly became wary of one another. Most university foundations are legally independent from their universities, but most are, in fact, simply arms of the office of the universities’ presidents. What the president wants, he gets — and foundation boards, often groups of alums — usually just go through the motions of approving requests from a president. Sometimes, they don’t even do that.
Indeed, no one can remember a time when the ISU Foundation ever turned down a request from an ISU president.
But Leath, unlike Geoffroy, had several unusual requests. One was to buy an airplane for $3 million to $4 million, which would have allowed him to avoid disclosing that to the Board of Regents or the public. The plane then would be given to the university. It’s unclear how Leath accomplished this — one board member says the foundation never voted on the issue — but a person familiar with how foundations work said there often are back-doors into and out of foundations. At any rate, in February of 2014 the foundation bought a Beechcraft King Air 350 for $2,875,000 and spent another $600,000 on upgrades and furnishings. And it now is owned by the university.
The contract was signed not by Neuhaus but by Lisa Eslinger, the foundation’s senior vice president for finance and operations.
(The July 2014 contract to buy a single-engine, four-seat plane for $470,000 was directly with the university, perhaps because the price was below the threshold that required notification to the Board of Regents. It is this plane that pilot Leath damaged a year ago, an accident he didn’t report to the Board of Regents.)
At any rate, Neuhaus was soon gone. In return for his silence and an agreement not to sue, the foundation paid him $28,125 a month for 12 months and agreed to pick up the full cost of medical insurance for a year. He also got $4,685 in accrued-vacation pay. Foundation tax forms say Neuhaus was paid $332,960 in 2014 plus about $40,000 in “other compensation.” (At the end of the year, the foundation had assets of about $880 million.)
Saftig, who had been at the foundation for nearly a decade, got a richer deal. His “separation agreement” guaranteed $35,000 a month for 18 months, full medical benefits for the 18 months, $81,254.57 from a deferred compensation account, $6,250 for payments into a deferred-comp plan, $7,500 for legal fees and up to $10,000 for hiring a search firm to help him find a new job. He also got to keep his company car.
Saftig ultimately took a big fund-raising job at Arizona State University and now is a senior consultant in Arizona for Marks and Lundy, a large consulting firm based in New Jersey. Neuhaus now is the chief development officer for Habitat for Humanity of Central Arizona.
The foundation now is headed by Larissa Holtmyer Jones, who signed a three-year, $340,000-a-year contract in April of last year. If the foundation fires her without cause, she gets full payout of her contract of a year’s salary, whichever is greater. Her contract is not unlike the contracts given to football and basketball coaches: She can leave at any time without a financial penalty. …
Regents President Bruce Rastetter didn’t throw his friend Leath under the bus the other day at the Board of Regents meeting when he said he was “extremely disappointed” in Leath’s personal use of university aircraft, but the Regents head clearly walked the university president to the bus stop. …
John Tate and Jesse Benton are two of the three men convicted in federal court in Des Moines this year for their roles in funneling money to former state legislator Kent Sorenson to get him to switch his allegiance from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential caucus fights. In May, Federal Judge John Jarvey sentenced them to six months of home confinement and then two years of probation. A third defendant, Dmitri Kesari, was sentenced to three months in prison
The probation conditions barred them from associating with any person convicted of a felony — which would mean one another — without permission from the probation officer. The other day, Tate asked the court to remove that prohibition. It turns out the three men are back in politics, with Tate and Benton employed by the same political action committee and Tate and Kesari “in negotiations to be engaged by candidates and political action committees involved in Virginia state elections [in 2017] that will require them to work together,” according to court papers filed in mid-October.
The papers, filed by Tate’s lawyer, asked that the restriction be removed because “if they are barred from having any contact with each other…the ability…to be employed in their lawful profession of thirty years, in their home state, will be severely diminished.”
Not so fast, the government replied. “All three defendants argued [in sentencing hearings] that they should receive lenient sentences in large part because, they said, their careers in politics were over.” Now, the government noted in opposing the request, “all three are right back at their former political employment less than a month after sentencing, apparently suffering nothing like the adverse career consequences they asserted in open court.”
Judge Jarvey has not yet ruled on the request.
Dan Johnston
Dan Johnston leaves two legacies.
As a 30-year-old lawyer in 1968, he argued and won a United States Supreme Court case that ensured the free-speech rights of students. “Students do not shed their Constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate,” Justice Abe Fortas wrote in the 7-to-2 decision involving the rights of students in the Tinker family to wear black armbands to schools in Des Moines to protest the Vietnam War.
Though the decision has been diluted over the years, it was and remains a great victory for freedom in America.
And as a still-young lawyer in 1972, he argued an Iowa Supreme Court case that led to new rules for apportioning state legislative districts — a system now viewed as a model for American states.
He was equally, and rightfully, proud of both.
He was a smart and complicated man. Raised in Marshalltown, he graduated from Drake Law School in 1964 and was elected to the Iowa House in 1966 after a stint as an assistant Iowa Attorney General. Two years later, he won a three-way primary to get the Democratic nomination to run for Attorney General, but he lost to Dick Turner by more than 100,000 votes in a million-vote election. Backed by organized labor, he was appointed Polk County attorney in 1977, when Ray Fenton was appointed to the bench, and he won a full term in 1978. He was re-elected in 1982.
At the time of his elections, he was a closeted gay and the subject of whispering campaigns. He recalls ducking the issue on a radio call-in show, but others say the caller in effect outed him before the 1982 election. Though he won handily each time, he remained in the background as the gay-rights movements began to sweep the country following the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969.
He left as county attorney in 1985 and moved to New York, where, among other things, he became a strong advocate for gay rights. He moved back to Iowa about 10 years ago.
In his retirement speech from Polk County, he acknowledged his homosexuality.
“I made three points in that speech,” he said the other day from his hospital bed. He spoke out against the death penalty, he recalled. He said there was “no inconsistency between law enforcement and civil liberties,” he said. And, he recalled, “I said I had stood up for children and immigrant farm workers, but never for the group whose oppression I know the best — my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.”
He had a 35-year love affair with Norman Jesse, whom he met at Drake Law School and who served in the Iowa Legislature for 12 years. They lived apart but were often together in a relationship that became increasingly open. Jesse, who died in 2000, was “the love of my life,” Johnston said.
If Jesse was the love of his life, civil rights came in a close second. He had an unshakeable belief in the equality of laws and the dignity of man — for a while he was a staff lawyer for the Iowa Civil Liberties Union. And he had an unbreakable faith in unions — though as county attorney he stood with police during the bitter, 19-month Delavan strike by the Auto Workers in 1978 and 1979 to ensure that non-union replacements could safely cross picket lines; he also believed in law and order.
He never made any money — he got no fee for the Tinker case, though Joe Rosenfield picked up the $500 in expenses — and in recent years he had a spartan life style. He mentored young lawyers who shared his beliefs and took great pride in their efforts and accomplishments. At lunch, he always talked more about them than about himself, about their cases and about how they were fighting the good fight for the good cause.
He often ate lunch alone, at a high table at the Cub Club at Principal Park, and, wan and slow-moving and a bit disheveled, at times he seemed almost a ghost from the past as he stopped by to talk with judges and lawyers and others lunching there. But his mind was always in the present — expressing outrage at this injustice or disbelief at that absurdity. More recently, he was astonished by the presidential race. His final request to a kind nurse who watched over him at Iowa Methodist was to take him downtown to the Election Office to vote. She did, on Oct. 10. The next day, he was moved to Kavanagh House to die.
He was 78 and riddled with cancer when he died there on Oct. 21.
— Michael Gartner