Rail director Thelma Drake keeps up partisan work

RICHMOND

Every year for more than a decade, Thelma Drake has hosted a "Party on the Pier" to raise money for political causes.

For most of those years, she was an elected official herself - first in the Virginia House of Delegates, later in Congress. This year, the party is continuing, but Drake has traded her elected office for an appointed state job - director of the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

This year's event is sponsored by the Tusk and Trunk Club, a Republican political action committee of which Drake is president. Earlier this year, the PAC received $1,000 from Norfolk Southern, one of several rail companies her agency deals with.

Drake said her role with the club does not conflict with her position at the state rail agency. And she said the company's support of the PAC is not new - Norfolk Southern has made several contributions over the years. The 2010 contribution - which club officials said covered the cost of attending a dinner in March - is the only one from the rail company to the club in recent years, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit group that tracks political donations.

Drake said the annual event at Ocean View Fishing Pier is a fun, casual family event that showcases the Chesapeake Bay. Money raised by Tusk and Trunk helps fund the campaigns of local and state GOP candidates for office, particularly those in the 2nd Congressional District, which Drake represented until 2009. Her role with the club, Drake added, does not mean she is raising money for a future political run of her own.

The connection between the transportation company's donation and Drake's state job "does create some perception of a conflict of interest," George Mason University political science professor Mark Rozell said.

"Political action committees have an overtly political purpose: to raise money for partisan candidates," he said, adding that Drake, as the director of a state agency, is expected to "execute the law and carry out regulations in a nonpartisan fashion."

"Those are two extraordinarily different roles for one person to be playing simultaneously," Rozell said.

McDonnell administration officials said staff members are advised not to participate in political activities on state time and are prohibited from soliciting or accepting campaign contributions from firms that do business with the wing of government in which they work. If they join any political causes, it must be as a private citizen, not a representative of the state.

There isn't a specific state law that spells out those rules, McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin said, but employees understand "you have to keep those two functions separate."

Still, periodic questions about policymakers and their partisan leanings persist because of Virginia's lax rules on the subject, Rozell said.

"There are conflicts of interest all over the place that go on for various reasons because this state has chosen to have a loose, unregulated system."

Julian Walker, (804) 697-1564, julian.walker@pilotonline.com