Another Smithsonian Compensation Controversy: Rick West's Expenses Exposed

Excerpt from W. Richard West Jr.'s $30,000-plus retirement video, posted online by the Washington Post

This makes me sad. But it does suggest another hot-button issue ripe for another position paper from the Association of Art Museum Directors: What constitutes appropriate expenditures for travel, entertainment and other activities of museum officials, and what kinds of reporting and oversight should be instituted?

I think W. Richard West Jr. did a fine job realizing the Smithsonian Institution's dreams for a National Museum of the American Indian on the Washington Mall. (I reviewed the opening for the Wall Street Journal here.)

But a 2,600-word exposé of West's travel and entertainment habits in today's Washington Post indicates that the museum's recently retired director measured his nonprofit compensation against his former expectations as a private-practice attorney. His peregrinations reportedly exceeded those of the high-flying former head of the Smithsonian, Lawrence Small.

West told the Post:

I am grateful for at least the past year to have been the highest-paid director of a museum in the Smithsonian. Even at that status I have yet to earn even two-thirds of what I earned as a private attorney in my last year.

The Post noted that "West's spending continued even after Congress this year stepped up oversight of the Smithsonian" but he and his staff "became increasingly wary about how his spending would be perceived if it was made public."

Now it has been.

It's not clear from the story how reporters James Grimaldi and Jacqueline Trescott obtained their exhaustively detailed information about such delightful interludes as "a 23-day trip costing more than $18,000 [that] began in February and stretched into March and included stops in the American Southwest, Australia, New Zealand and Paris" and "a $286 meal with filmmaker and photographer Gwendolen Cates during which most of the tab went for alcoholic beverages, including a $75 bottle of Italian wine, a 1997 Barbaresco."

Could it be that a certain Senator's office was a helpful source for this story?