Saturday, Oct. 28, 2006 | 7:46 a.m.
WASHINGTON - It's not much in the big picture, the $28,000 the Government Printing Office spent to print up and mail a speech given by its boss, Nevadan Bruce James.
But for librarians across the United States struggling to keep government documents accessible to the public, that $28,000 would sure help.
Emily Sheketoff, associate executive director of the American Library Association, said librarians nationwide are fighting for funds to smooth the transition as the Government Printing Office puts more documents online instead of on library shelves. Librarians have little hope that Congress will grant their request to boost the printing office's budget by $10 million this year to help with that mission.
So it hurt to see the 12-page, slick reprint of the speech land on her desk last month, with a color cover featuring a full-length photo of James in front of a portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
"If I were asked how I want their money spent, I would want their money spent making information available to the public," Sheketoff said. "I don't see why any information has to be spent on promoting Bruce James."
James is a millionaire Republican and former printing executive who President Bush tapped four years ago to head the printing office. Its $880 million annual budget goes to print federal documents and make them accessible to the public.
James' spokeswoman, Veronica Meter, said there was nothing wrong with the expenditure because he needs to let his customers know what's going on with his agency. The speech, delivered to his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, summed up the transformation under way to put documents online, as well as the office's financial turnaround. The printing office had $100 million in losses before James came in, and now operates in the black.
Meter said federal workers printed the document between jobs. Then he mailed it to 20,000 federal agency clients, interest groups and journalists.
"We didn't write a check for this," Meter said. "We did it here. This is what we do."
"From the Founding Fathers to the Digital Age: A Look at the Latest American Revolution" was the second or third speech James printed and mailed in his four years.
Patrice McDermott, director of openthegovernment.org, a good-government group in Washington, called the mailing a "vanity piece" that was not a smart political move. "It's not a wise use of funds to do something like this in a year when Congress is asking where they can cut."
A quick survey of comparable Legislative Branch offices shows few executives have their speeches shared that way.
In nearly eight years as comptroller of the United States, David Walker has had just two speeches printed and distributed. Total cost: $2,800 for 4,000 copies.
He puts the rest online. Why?
"Because this is the age of the Internet," said his spokesman, Paul Anderson.
The librarian of Congress, James Billington, does not print up his speeches. "He makes the speech, we put them up on our Web site," his spokeswoman said.
James, who ran briefly in the 1998 Nevada Republican primary for U.S. Senate, has told Bush he is ready to step down and return to Nevada. Personally and through his companies, he has given more than $70,000 to candidates, mostly Republicans, since 1997, according to the Federal Elections Commission.
James got off to a rocky start in the capital when he floated ideas to charge for public documents.
But even detractors now give James credit for righting and modernizing the agency. It had a $6 million operating surplus for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2005.
"He has been known as a real change agent," said Prudence Adler, associate executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. "There was a lot of questioning before he came in about the value of that agency."
But that doesn't make the reprinted speech any more popular. "The spending of the $28,000, sure it probably could have been spent better," said Duncan Aldrich, the Nevada digital initiative administrator at the Getchell Library at UNR.
He received two copies of the speech.
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