Transparency, Money and Management

The directors of the California stem cell agency delivered a message to Robert Klein on Tuesday.

Irritated by the lack of consultation and information on the agency's budget and spending, they restricted the size of personal service contracts to $100,000 that can be let by Klein and agency employees without board approval. The Oversight Committee also created a governance committee to deal with how the agency does its business.

The agency has spent $2 million so far this year, including more than $1 million in contracts with outside firms or agencies. Earlier some Oversight Committee members expressed displeasure about learning first about the contracts from non-agency sources. That triggered a bit of a flap concerning Klein's management (see "Murky Money" on this blog June 14).

Reporter Laura Mecoy of The Sacramento Bee and Terri Somers of the San Diego Union Tribune covered the management flap as well as other issues in their stories this morning.

Mecoy focused primarily on the Oversight Committee's approval of rules to "open more meetings, disclose more information about its grant awards and tighten its conflict-of-interest rules."

Somers led with the news that the California treasurer's office is "preparing to sell $200 million in bond anticipation notes to start funding the institute's first round of grants and first full year of operations."

She said the schedule calls for the notes to be issued prior to September so that the board can make grants for training programs that months. Twenty-six California institutions have expressed an interest in the multimillion dollar grants, but CIRM has refused to release their names.

The agency adopted its new rules on openness and disclosure following heavy pressure from the California legislators, led by Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, a strong backer of Prop. 71 and chair of the Senate Health Committee. More changes in the area of conflicts of interest are scheduled to come up at the August meeting.

CIRM was quick to issue a press release on the Tuesday action, posting one by mid-afternoon. Klein said in that statement, “Sen. Ortiz has committed intense energy and passion to this important task of ensuring that California has the highest and best public transparency, conflicts provisions, and legislative oversight of any state or federal program in our nation. This is an ongoing process and we will continue to listen to the input of the legislature and the public to ensure the finest standards for medicine, ethics, and competitive peer review in every aspect of our stem cell program.”

The agency summarized the new rules as:
"broadening conflict of interest provisions for working group members;
"providing earlier public availability of working group funding recommendations;
"requiring comprehensive reports to the State Legislature summarizing grant awards and recipients;
"ensuring increased public access to meetings of the Standards Working Group and the Facilities Working group;
"and providing public access to the Grants Working Group, except for discussions related to scientific and medical evaluations of grant applications and other mission critical exceptions."

The California Stem Cell Report will have more on the transparency and conflict issues on Thursday.