It was past midnight and Sen. Howard Stephenson was livid.

Hammering out an early-morning e-mail to Utah education officials, the Draper Republican lashed out at "subversives" in the department for their shabby treatment of ProCert Labs, an Orem-based company whose services Stephenson had been advocating for years.

In a series of heated e-mails and phone calls, Stephenson, who heads the committee that sets the public education budget, threatened to withhold support from the Utah Office of Education, suggested it be downsized and have work outsourced and that the malcontents mistreating ProCert could be fired.

"This persistent, long-term and ongoing defiance on the part of [the two employees] is unacceptable and, in my opinion, is justification for termination of employment," Stephenson wrote.

The e-mail, and other angry phone calls and missives from Stephenson on ProCert's behalf, stunned state Superintendent Patti Harrington.

"When it gets to be a strained relationship around one vendor and irate e-mails around one vendor, that does get problematic, and it feels like we're being bullied," Harrington said. "I don't think that's an appropriate type of pressure to be put on a state agency."

But it was just one example of several since 2007 in which Stephenson had waded into the minutiae of contracts and vendors at the state education office, attempting to shape education programs created by the Legislature and the lucrative contracts to implement them.

"I'm just trying to get the 21st-century tools into the hands of our teachers and I don't care who gets the bid," said Stephenson, who also is president of the Utah Taxpayers Association and a registered lobbyist. "When you're as committed to saving money, precious taxpayer resources, as I am, that's why I want to make sure we get the best bang for the buck."

He said his watchdogging stopped education officials from diverting $30 million meant for technology improvements into salaries and pushed stubborn bureaucrats into adopting new technology and upgrading Utah's lagging rate of computers in classrooms.

Records show that, on several occasions in the past two years Stephenson made detailed recommendations and suggested specific changes to criteria for picking companies to receive state funds, including revisions to a program to provide laptop computers to preschoolers.

That degree of legislative involvement is rare. Typically, lawmakers set policy, allocate funds and then let the executive branch award contracts. Occasionally legislators have called with input, but none, aside from Stephenson, has put any complaints or recommendations in writing.

Harrington said Stephenson is the "singular example" of a legislator who has weighed in with the education office and, as the senator who controls the education budget, his wishes are hard to ignore.

That type of interaction "is exactly what everyone doesn't want to have happen," said Steven Schooner, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in government contracting.

"It could be the people doing the purchasing were incompetent," Schooner said. "But if your Legislature is getting involved in individual procurements, the system isn't going to work in the long run."

Last summer, the Legislature's general counsel gave GOP lawmakers a primer on the propriety of intervening in government-contract issues, a response to Stephenson's actions and other factors.

The Legislature's ethics rules state that members "shall not exercise any undue influence on any governmental entity," but Stephenson maintains he's crossing no such lines.

"It's my job, as chairman of the committee," he said, "that the will of the Legislature is carried out when we do pass laws and make appropriations for these things."

Stephenson said he has no financial stake in any of the companies involved in the contracting issues. They have not contributed to his campaigns nor do they belong to the Utah Taxpayers Association. His only motivation, he said, is a passion to ensure teachers get the tools they need.

Harrington said she respects Stephenson's vision and drive for using technology in classrooms, and they frequently see eye to eye.

At the same time, her department no longer provides advance copies of "requests for proposals" to legislators, rules have been adopted to insulate the contracting process, and she now makes the final determination on high-profile contracts to protect her staff from political pressure.

Stephenson said he suspects educators may be criticizing him now because in tough budget times he has resisted their effort to ax many reforms he championed, such as performance pay for teachers and laptops for preschoolers.

"Collectively, these things I've been pushing have a toll on the state office and there is a desire to neutralize me as chairman of education appropriations, and I think this reaction is an attempt to do that," he said, adding that he won't stop pushing the office for reforms.

The most striking example of Stephenson's activism involved ProCert Labs, which is seeking to review Utah's textbooks, pinpointing where concepts in the state's core curriculum are taught to help instructors teach the required lessons. The work could be worth millions.

ProCert President Paul Hoffmann, who is the son-in-law of prominent lobbyist Ruland Gill, said the company has clashed with some education officials for years for reasons he doesn't understand, but suspects the bureaucrats might feel threatened by privatization.

In 2003, a legislative committee, which included Stephenson, took the unusual step of writing specifications for innovative education programs, then awarded handpicked vendors, including ProCert, money to bid for the programs. But when the Legislature tried to fund the ProCert contract the next year, then-Gov. Olene Walker vetoed the project.

Walker said she felt having lawmakers award contracts to specific vendors was inappropriate.

"The Legislature has the right to make policy and set divisions of power, but it's the executive branch's job to implement them," Walker said last week, "and I felt quite strongly about that separation of powers."

At the time, Stephenson accused Walker in his taxpayer-association newsletter of caving to the teachers union. "In hindsight," he now says, "after reflecting on it, she probably did the right thing."

Harrington has been no fan of private "curriculum alignment." She says the panel of educators that has screened textbooks for more than eight decades has done it well.

Stephenson dismisses those in-house screenings as "schlock reviews" that are practically useless for teachers.

In 2007, Stephenson helped pass a bill requiring private textbook reviews, leaving it to state education officials to pick qualified reviewers. But when he felt ProCert was being treated unfairly by the state office, he made his displeasure known.

"I've had it!" Stephenson wrote in an e-mail. "It is obvious that [the program directors] are subversives who will stop at nothing to prevent the effective alignment of the texts to the core. … Perhaps downsizing USOE or outsourcing is the answer."

In another e-mail from his Senate account, he said, "I've never seen anything more outrageous in my 15 years in the Legislature."

Harrington replied that the office had "reached out to ProCert beyond what we have to others," and if Stephenson wanted to give ProCert the contract, "then we do have a problem that will need a broader remedy."

Stephenson says his e-mails were "advocacy for fairness." After a bidding process that dragged on for months, the Legislature amended the law last March and the contract has yet to be awarded.

gehrke@sltrib.com