Jana Hollingsworth’s coverage is fair enough and the headline is right on. I’m not mollified. I’m pretty annoyed that an investigation touted as taking a year to complete yielded 8 pages of such anemic results. Among my takeaways: a little less than 30% of the cost of the Red Plan which ballooned to over $300 million ended up being paid to a troika of program managers. Their loot ($84 million) is easily double what most projects should have paid out for “soft costs.” Its a little like Duluth’s voters had three vampires at their necks at the same time for six years. Red planners probably thought of them more as little piggies suckling at their mother’s teats.
JCI couldn’t handle the project on their own so they shared the duties and the looties with Bossardt and Krause-Anderson because there was plenty of spoils for all.
Krause Anderson had a guy on the Board which oversees the ethics of architects who had no objections to JCI using unlicensed architects despite state rules against this to come up with the initial Red Plans. Art Johnston discovered this (be forewarned, this post has a long icky prologue) to his chagrin six years ago. They profited handsomely from the decision to let fly-by-nights get the Red Plan underway. Duluth has ten too many kids in its classrooms as a result.
Chair Miernicki, who appeared the very essence of a pro-Red Planner, couldn’t wait for our meeting yesterday to conclude and hectored Art and me not to ask questions which he considered off target. That was most of our questions. He didn’t have to worry. The State Auditor’s team offered no opinions. They will be sending us a bill. I’m guessing it will probably cost us a thousand dollars per page. As mentioned before this was not an audit despite the petition requesting it.
If we had any doubt how seriously this would be taken by the State Auditor we might have gotten a better sense by looking at the history of audits prompted by petitions. I’ve been told by others who perused this whole page of the Auditor’s activities that you only find such audits being done once back in 1995. Its for the City of Cambridge and its at the bottom of the list.
And yet the TV advertisements the Auditor will soon be putting on air touts her as having discovered hundreds of millions of mispent public dollars according to the Forum’s Don Davis:
She begins her commercial saying that she ran because she discovered “hundreds of millions of dollars in errors” in local government audits. She ends it with: “I will make sure the numbers add up.”
The ISD 709 report does not seem to have made it yet on her vast website.
