UMass pollster worked on side

Louis C. DiNatale, for a decade the producer of public opinion polls at the University of Massachusetts, has quietly moonlighted as a paid political consultant for several years, and informally advised three current gubernatorial candidates, arranging a poll by his top aide for one of them.

DiNatale's freelance work includes a private poll conducted last month for a group engaged in an expensive lobbying effort to deregulate the state's automobile insurance rate-setting process. In addition, two close business associates or DiNatale himself have conducted polls, provided other campaign services, or offered advice to the state Senate's top Democrat, several other candidates, and two referendum campaigns.

DiNatale disclosed the outside work to his superiors last week, after the Globe inquired about the arrangements and the potential appearance of a conflict of interest. Yesterday, the executive vice chancellor at University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Frederick Sperounis, issued a statement saying: ''To eliminate even the appearance issues, Mr. DiNatale has agreed not to accept any further private survey work."

Sperounis added, ''The university does not see any legal or ethical issues associated with Mr. DiNatale's work, but will review all the issues raised and will take appropriate action if warranted."

In an interview last week, DiNatale insisted that there was nothing improper about his outside work and that there is no evidence he altered poll results.

His extracurricular activities are wide-ranging, extending to an unusual relationship with Christy P. Mihos, now an independent candidate for governor.

Asked about his outside work, DiNatale conceded in an interview that last fall he persuaded Mihos, then a prospective candidate, to hire Barry Hock, DiNatale's former business partner and currently his chief aide at UMass-Lowell, to conduct a poll privately. DiNatale said he then analyzed the results and made recommendations to Mihos, who recently decided to abandon the Republican Party for an independent candidacy.

DiNatale said that he was never paid by Mihos, with whom he met several times, and that he ''got disinvolved, once he decided to become a candidate."

But the private polling -- followed by the public, UMass-Lowell survey in February that included Mihos -- crossed a professional line for pollsters, a leading industry figure said.

''It's on its face a conflict of interest if you're doing private polling for a candidate where you're also doing public polling on the race," said Cliff Zukin, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Zukin, a Rutgers University professor, is the former director of The (Newark) Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers Poll.

''That's an extremely messy situation," Zukin said, asserting that pollsters ''have a public obligation . . . to avoid the appearance of impropriety."

Asked to respond, DiNatale said last week: ''It's messy, but it is not illegal or unethical.

''I can do anything I want in my private time. I can do all this stuff, OK?"

Moreover, DiNatale asserted that he has provided at least as much unpaid advice to the Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly and Deval L. Patrick, as he has given to Mihos.

The oft-quoted DiNatale doubles as UMass-Lowell's director of the Center for Economic and Civic Opinion and its executive director of public affairs. He moved to the Lowell campus in July 2004, after spending 20 years at UMass-Boston, where he split his time doing polling, research, and teaching at the McCormack Institute and working in the UMass president's office. The results of his UMass poll, launched in 1996, have frequently been published in the Globe.

DiNatale's sideline is particularly thorny, because he works at a public university, currently at a salary of $154,500. UMass relies on tax dollars appropriated by politicians he advises.

''It's hairy; there's no question about it," DiNatale said in an interview. ''You're working at a public university, and when you poll . . . on basically your bosses, OK, you get [expletive]."

DiNatale's expansive sideline had not been generally known in the state's tightknit political community.

On Feb. 19, the Globe reported DiNatale's advisory role in a profile of Mihos, who at the time was deciding whether to run as a GOP candidate or as an independent. Three days earlier, the newspaper had published a University of Massachusetts gubernatorial poll, overseen by DiNatale and Hock, that included Mihos.

That February UMass survey, DiNatale said, generated complaints from Reilly and from Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, a Republican and also a candidate for governor, and from Senate President Robert E. Travaglini. Healey's campaign specifically criticized DiNatale's advisory role with Mihos.

The Mihos relationship, DiNatale acknowledged, left him ''vulnerable to appearance arguments, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it, and this issue is being driven by Republicans who are convinced that . . . because I'm a Democrat, I advised Christy Mihos to run as an independent."

DiNatale said he gave a report last fall to Mihos and to some Mihos advisers that concluded, based on Hock's poll, that Mihos was ''not viable" in either a Republican primary against Healey or as an independent.

But a copy of the poll and DiNatale's analysis contradict that account. The analysis, obtained by the Globe, gave no assessment of Mihos's strength as an independent, rated Healey ''a weak candidate with potential problems" in a GOP primary, and recommended that Mihos spend $200,000 on direct-mail contact to Republican voters between last October and Jan. 1.

Mihos, who describes DiNatale as a friend, said he has never met Hock. ''My sense is I've talked to him," Mihos said. ''I sent him a check when we were billed, and that was it."

DiNatale said Hock charged Mihos ''around eight grand" for the survey conducted last Sept. 25-29, about a month after Hock joined UMass-Lowell as associate director of the Center for Economic and Civic Opinion.

Hock and DiNatale have been friends for 30 years and, until a few years ago, operated a polling business together, DiNatale said. Hock now operates Hock Research out of his unit in a Needham apartment complex.

In September, DiNatale steered the Committee for a Democratic Senate, Travaglini's political action committee, to hire Hock. ''I forget what the issue was. It might have been healthcare; it might have been something else," DiNatale said. For the poll, the PAC paid Hock $8,000 Sept. 19, shortly after he went on the UMass-Lowell payroll at a salary of $85,000.

Asked about the propriety of hiring a public employee to poll for Travaglini's use, the PAC's treasurer, attorney Thomas R. Kiley, said: ''Public employees get to have second jobs" under the state's conflict-of-interest law. ''I assume they have the brains to do things right," he said.

Hock did not return calls from the Globe, but DiNatale said his aide's polling is done ''on his private time, in his own way, totally separate from the university in every way." DiNatale said his own moonlighting is done on nights and weekends, using personal phones and computer equipment.

Since 2000, Hock and his company have billed about $330,000 to candidates, a referendum campaign, and Travaglini's PAC. Most of the money was passed through to pay other vendors, DiNatale said, including ''five or $10,000" to himself in the 2000 Senate election of Harriette L. Chandler, Democrat of Worcester.

DiNatale was also paid at least $11,000, through another company, for work on a 2001 fluoride referendum campaign in Worcester.

DiNatale's name does not appear on public campaign finance records, however; he is paid through other consulting companies, including Winning Choices, one of several businesses owned by Paul J. Giorgio of Worcester, operating out of a storefront on Winter Street in an industrial section of Worcester.

Since 2002, Winning Choices has been paid $219,000 by a half-dozen candidates and a statewide referendum committee, state campaign finance records show. DiNatale, who lives in Lancaster, said he was paid on occasion by Giorgio, another longtime friend, for work on local races in the Worcester area.

DiNatale and Giorgio bought the former Atlantic Bag Co. building on Winter Street in 2002 for $225,000 and have renovated it. SPQR, ''an Italian Caffe" owned by Giorgio and DiNatale's wife, Gail Sullivan, is also located there.

Last month, under the name Winning Choices, DiNatale conducted a poll of 315 Western Massachusetts voters for Fairness for Good Drivers, a coalition of insurance companies engaged in a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to loosen the state's rate-setting role in auto insurance.

DiNatale also briefed Senator Andrea F. Nuciforo Jr., Senate chairman of the Joint Committee on Financial Services, on the poll results.

''Yes, I brought it to Nuciforo," DiNatale said. ''They asked me because they knew I was an honest broker."