Speaking to a friend recently I came to find out that Meleah Maynard had been fired by City Pages
This is unfortunate. She was the media person most familiar with Heritage Park. I suspect this may have had something to do with losing her job. This project continues to emit a mighty fishy smell. It has been a sinkhole of money. Up until last summer this project was considered a public project and was overseen by those citizens who followed the Implementation Meetings. The city handed over $10 million to McCormack/Baron and in no time at all it became a private project. There are some real heavyweights who would like to drop a curtain around this project. There are problems ahead. A work stoppage perhaps. The folks in the community who like to motormouth are finding fertile ground. The city's Public Works Dept and private contractors are not keeping their word about hiring practices. Are we shocked? Councilmember Johnson Lee was beating this drum all summer and it is a good part of the reason she beat the incumbent City Council President. The former City Council President is one who would like to drop that curtain. That is why her successor found an empty file cabinet. I'm non-plussed that it took until the end of Feb., nearly two months after Johnson Lee took office for this story to come out to the public. Meanwhile we have feel good stories about an outside investigator finding no systemic corruption that he could find in Regulatory Services. On January 31st after Don Jorovsky had offered a link to a Philadelphia Inquirer story about corruption, I wrote in this forum that it was unfortunate that Joe Duffy's purview was tightly circumscribed. Former Councilmember Mead shot back that this was not the truth and that Mr. Duffy had a free hand to go wherever the trail led him and that the constraint put on him was the issue of money; i.e., that he check back with the Council if he was approaching a certain amount. She said "Let's not handcuff the guy before he starts" Mr. Duffy began his oral comments Monday by outlining what the parameters were for his investigation. It was pretty specific and very narrow. I agree with Councilman Lilligren's comment in a Strib article that he thought there was an overemphasis in his Southside area. I never had the feeling from what Mr.Duffy detailed that he had covered the waterfront. I am not graced with the written report. I might think otherwise if I could read it. I doubt it but one never knows. I believe there is a tendency to gloss over facts. You have to read things carefully. For instance; there was a story on page 2 of the Metro Section of todays Strib about the light rail project. The headline reads: "Audit shows light rail is running below budget." And yet near the end of the story we read this: "Thomas Donahue, an audit manager, said the auditor's office was directed by the Legislature to provide a 'tracking' of light-rail costs and not an 'audit of the cost'. Although the office did not find any irregularities, he said, 'we did not apply any audit test tosee if an [expenditure] was legal or not,or appropriate." Small point perhaps though I think not. Joe Duffy likewise was not empowered or expected to do an audit of Regulatory Services. That was a parameter of his investigation. I don't mean to cast aspersions so much as to suggest we look more closely at ways our government functions. For instance: what happens when a job, say of soil remediation in Heritage Park is put out for bid and the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder but then the contractor(s) comes back later and says they need more money to complete the job. Presumably they have found greater environmental damage? What if other contractors had taken those things into consideration in their bid whereas the contractor who received the contract had not though they expected the job might entail more than they were letting on? I know this is all hypothetical but I get concerned when I see more money flowing through Ways and Means for work on Heritage Park which was let out for bid and awarded to a contractor late last summer. I've wandered I know and I apologize for that. The point I want to make is: there is a much greater need for oversight especially on complex development projects like Heritage Park and losing someone who has historical knowledge, someone like Meleah Maynard is a great loss. Tim Connolly Ward 7 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - sign up for Fantasy Baseball http://sports.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
