{"id":11330,"date":"2014-07-23T12:07:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T17:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=11330"},"modified":"2014-07-23T12:23:16","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T17:23:16","slug":"not-mollified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=11330","title":{"rendered":"Not mollified"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jana Hollingsworth&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duluthnewstribune.com\/content\/minnesota-auditors-office-review-fails-mollify-critics-duluths-red-plan\">coverage<\/a> is fair enough and the headline is right on. I&#8217;m not mollified. I&#8217;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 &#8220;soft costs.&#8221; Its a little like Duluth&#8217;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&#8217;s teats.<\/p>\n<p>JCI couldn&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>Krause Anderson had a guy on <a href=\"http:\/\/mn.gov\/aelslag\/\">the Board<\/a> 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. <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=2597\">Art Johnston discovered this<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n<p>Chair Miernicki, who appeared the very essence of a pro-Red Planner, couldn&#8217;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&#8217;t have to worry. The State Auditor&#8217;s team offered no opinions. They will be sending us a bill. I&#8217;m guessing it will probably cost us a thousand dollars per page. As mentioned before this was not <a href=\"http:\/\/www.auditor.state.mn.us\/default.aspx?page=20040809.001\">an audit<\/a> despite the petition requesting it.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve been told by others who perused <a href=\"http:\/\/www.auditor.state.mn.us\/list.aspx?type=afs\">this whole page<\/a> of the Auditor&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.morrissuntribune.com\/content\/capitol-chatter-us-house-races-bring-money-too\">Forum&#8217;s Don Davis<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>She begins her commercial saying that she ran because she discovered &#8220;hundreds of millions of dollars in errors&#8221; in local government audits. She ends it with: &#8220;I will make sure the numbers add up.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The ISD 709 report does not seem to have made it yet on her vast website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jana Hollingsworth&#8217;s coverage is fair enough and the headline is right on. I&#8217;m not mollified. I&#8217;m pretty annoyed that an investigation touted as taking&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,35,102,80],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11330"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11330"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11334,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11330\/revisions\/11334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}