Posted on: Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Campaign arrest faulted

By Robbie Dingeman and Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Staff Writers

Gov. Ben Cayetano yesterday questioned whether criminal theft charges are too harsh for city official Mike Amii, who was arrested Monday on suspicion of felony theft related to allegedly doing campaign work for Mayor Jeremy Harris on city time.

Amii, 56, who has worked for the Harris administration since 1995, has served as director of the Department of Community Services since last year and has been a key campaign official for the mayor. Amii was released after his arrest on suspicion of second-degree theft, but not charged with any offense. Under state law, second-degree theft involves stealing between $300 and $20,000.

Cayetano yesterday said he only knows of the case from what he has learned from the news media, but said he would think that doing political work on government time would prompt disciplinary action, not criminal charges.

"It would seem to me that you deal with those things either through a reprimand or you fire the person or you take some disciplinary action," Cayetano said. "It seems to me that filing criminal charges against an employee for those reasons are rather draconian."

Cayetano said he knows that many appointed government workers in both the state and the city government are in salaried positions and will take time off and not file the proper paperwork right away. Harris campaign attorney William McCorriston has said that he believes the arrest is inappropriate and that the case may amount to Amii forgetting to fill out a vacation form or leave form.

In 1997, Cayetano said he fired Amii as a special assistant for the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations' office of community services because "he didn't do anything but politics." But yesterday, Caye-

tano said those actions appear to fall short of a crime. "You fire the person or take that kind of action," Cayetano said. "But from everything I know, Mike Amii has not been convicted of any crime, and does not have a past record of wrongdoing."

He added that "maybe there's more to it than meets the eye, I don't know."

City prosecutors have declined to provide details of the allegations of Amii doing Harris campaign work on city time.

Amii's arrest is the first arising from the Campaign Spending Commission sending its investigation of the Harris campaign to the city prosecutor's office.

State Campaign Spending Commission executive director Robert Watada said yesterday that the commission had questioned a number of expenses connected to Amii in the case it referred to the prosecutor's office early this year.

Watada said that Amii traveled to California and Washington, D.C., with Harris, his wife and another campaign official on Democratic National Committee business. The Harris campaign covered expenses for both trips for a total of nearly $10,000.

Watada said that he knew that Amii figured prominently in Harris campaign records. "We suspected a number of irregularities that we reported to the city," he said. Amii is known as a tireless campaigner and organizer, who has worked in local government for more than 30 years.

"Campaign money is supposed to be used for the purposes of an election, to get you elected," Watada said and that's why the expenses were flagged.