Page board chair wants monthly meetings

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - The incoming chairman of the congressional Page Board said Thursday he hopes the panel will meet monthly and expand its membership to help prevent another scandal.

Rep. Dale Kildee (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., who will become the panel's chairman when Democrats take control of the House next year, said the board should meet regularly with directors of the program's school and dormitory and those who supervise the students during their work in Congress.

"I think it's a very, very good program and the problem with the program was not the pages -- it was a member and those who should have been more vigilant when this thing broke," Kildee said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Kildee said he supports incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's call reform of the program. Pelosi said Monday she intends to introduce legislation early in the new Congress to increase oversight of the page program, require regular board meetings and add a parent of a current and a former page to the board.

An ethics committee report last week on former Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record)'s improper sexual advances toward male pages found no evidence that lawmakers or aides violated any rules. But it noted a pattern of conduct among many people involved "to remain willfully ignorant of the potential consequences" of Foley's conduct.

Foley, R-Fla., abruptly resigned his seat Sept. 29 after sexually explicit computer messages sent to teenage pages were disclosed in media reports.

Kildee, a former high school Latin teacher and board member since 1985, said the panel had "gone six or seven months without meeting" before the public learned of Foley's salacious messages and "a lot of members weren't even aware that there even was a page board."

"Hopefully, though, the whole Congress will learn from this and recognize what our responsibility is," Kildee said. He said Congress has "an obligation" to approve reforms to the program shortly after it convenes in January.

After Foley's resignation, Kildee criticized the Page Board chairman, Rep. John Shimkus (news, bio, voting record), R-Ill., for not informing other board members about over-friendly e-mails from Foley to a page.

According to the report, Shimkus and the House clerk met with Foley in the fall of 2005 about e-mails sent to one page, but Foley assured them he was only acting as a mentor to the boy. After Foley resigned, Shimkus told the other Republican member of the Page Board -- Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (news, bio, voting record) of West Virginia -- why he never informed Kildee.

Shimkus said, "Dale's a nice guy, but he's a Democrat, and I was afraid it would be blown out of proportion," the report said.

Kildee said he would "have called for a page board meeting. When you have a 52-year-old person writing even what they thought at the time were overfriendly text messages to 16-, 17-year-olds, that should raise some alarm bells."

The Page Board consists of three lawmakers, the House clerk and the sergeant at arms. The board does not run the program day-to-day but watches over it. Teenagers from around the country, sponsored by lawmakers, attend a congressional school and perform messenger jobs.