Wednesday, November 2, 2011

I’m not sure hypothetical is the right word

Hypothetical scenario:

(1) There’s a city board in charge of granting out public money. (2) A member of the board leads the effort to set aside as much money as possible to pay for administrative expenses. (3) The same member of the board then leads the effort to have the board pay her sister to do administrative work, while simultaneously acting as her sister’s agent and only point of contact with the board. (4) This is administrative work which used to be done by board members for free, which could be done by volunteers, and which no comparable board pays money for. (5) The work will not be put out to bid, and the board will not ask for volunteers to do the work.

Is this more or less corrupt if the board member is also the board’s treasurer?
Aren’t there laws that ban this sort of action?
If the board is determined to throw away money on work that could be done for free or more cheaply, is the waste of public funds more important than the nepotism?
Would sunlight help fix any of this?
I resigned hours after (2) happened. Can I retroactively resign before (2)?
How do I get this rid of this overwhelming nausea?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

sunlight would certainly help. Not sure who to hand the mirror to, but perhaps a Patch correspondent would be interested? If we still have one.

Sounds ugly.

Michael said...

After 6 months of a truly terrible-looking redesign, and 6 months of an adequate redesign that they actually started updating some of the information on, they let the domain name expire. Despite repeated reminders. Because it's ok to divert hundreds of dollars of public money to a relative, but not ok to pay $13.70/year to keep your domain name live.