ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 15, 1996 TAG: 9603150039
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FAIRFAX
SOURCE: Associated Press
Some angry Republican business leaders say Attorney General Jim Gilmore's role in the divisive search for a new president of George Mason University could cost him their support should he run for governor next year.
``My sense is, he didn't shoot himself in the foot. He may have shot himself in the head,'' said Dwight Schar, a self-described ``hard-core'' Republican and chairman of NVR Inc., the Washington area's largest builder of houses.
Gilmore, the likely GOP gubernatorial nominee, advised George Mason officials last month to suspend their presidential search because of questions about the relationship between the university and the university-based Northern Virginia Roundtable, a powerful business organization that has made pushing the state to improve its education programs a priority.
University officials ignored his legal opinion, and the board of visitors chose Cornell University administrator Alan Merten on Tuesday to succeed retiring President George Johnson.
If the search had been delayed until July, trustees loyal to Republican Gov. George Allen would have become a majority on the board.
Several business leaders worried that the Allen faction wanted a president less supportive of the Roundtable's efforts to boost education spending.
Roundtable campaigned last year for increased state funding for higher education. Increased funding for all public education also was a major plank in the Democratic Party's platform in the 1995 General Assembly campaign. Allen campaigned actively for GOP candidates but fell shy of getting a first-ever majority in both Houses. The best the Republicans did was a 20-20 split in the Senate.
Gilmore hurt himself politically by appearing to join in a bid to postpone the presidential selection, several Northern Virginia business leaders said.
``I firmly believe Mr. Gilmore needs to reconcile his actions and those of the AG's[Attorney General's] office and his interests here in the region,'' said Gary Hevey, an accounting firm executive and former chairman of the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce. ``They seem at the moment to be irreconcilable.''
Gilmore declined to be interviewed for a story in Thursday's Washington Post. Through a spokesman, he said he did not intend to take either side in the George Mason dispute but simply answered university Rector Stanley Harrison's request for a legal opinion.
Harrison sought Gilmore's view on contentions by search critics that a firm hired to find candidates for Johnson's position was compromised because it had donated $15,000 to an economic conference organized by the Roundtable.
Gilmore spokesman Mark Miner said the attorney general answered the issue on the merits, and that any political considerations were secondary.
``He's the attorney general, and he's doing what's right under Virginia law,'' Miner said.
The beneficiary in the George Mason flap could be Lt. Gov. Don Beyer, a likely candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and a Northern Virginia car dealer who has actively courted the region's business leadership.
Since the 1980s, Northern Virginia's growing wealth has been a crucial source of campaign funds, coming first from the real estate development industry and more recently from executives of the growing technology business.
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