Tie 'twixt Stephens and grant reviewed

In June, former GOP gubernatorial candidate Fred Lampropoulos hired Utah House Speaker Marty Stephens as a top executive at Merit Medical Systems Inc. Two months later, the company received a $1 million state grant to create 600 new jobs at Merit's South Jordan production plant.

But Lampropoulos, Stephens and state officials who handle the taxpayer-funded Industrial Assistance Fund say Stephens did not lobby the Board of Business and Economic Development members, who approve IAF grants, on Merit's behalf.

In addition, Lampropoulos denounced as unjustified complaints that he's getting taxpayer money for jobs that he'd already publicly committed to last year.

The two apparent coincidences — Stephens' hiring two months before the grant was awarded last week and the question of grant money going for jobs that appeared to already be on the way — have raised some eyebrows on Capitol Hill.

In December 2004, Lampropoulos, Merit's CEO, board chairman and largest stockholder, announced that the firm was constructing a new 180,000-square-foot expansion to its current South Jordan company headquarters, creating "300 to 500" new jobs. At that time, Stephens and Lampropoulos were both vying for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. They were knocked out of the race in the May state GOP convention.

While the grant was primarily given to bring Merit jobs from California to Utah, Lampropoulos confirms that some new employees earmarked for the new facility, not transferred from a Santa Clara operation, could now qualify for the tax incentives.

"But who knows if those jobs were really coming?" Lampropoulos said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where he and Stephens, executive vice president of Merit's business development program, were scouting new business opportunities.

The December press release was accurate at the time, said Lampropoulos. But changing business opportunities have given Merit many alternatives, including moving current employees housed in a Murray facility to the new South Jordan building, he said.

Barbara Zimonja, chairwoman of the Board of Business and Economic Development's grant application review subcommittee, says the Merit grant was specifically written to provide more state money for the California-transfer jobs than for any other new jobs created by Merit in Utah. "We incentified them" to get the California jobs, she said.

Board member Dell Loy Hansen said, "Sixty to 70 percent of the jobs Merit has wouldn't qualify for the compensation" in any case because they don't pay at least 125 percent of Salt Lake County's medium income, a prime condition of the grant.