Mayor Richard’s 11th Hour Contract Should Be Immediately Terminated
Posted by Jeff Pruitt - 5/9/08 @ 1:45 am - Filed Under Featured, Local Politics
I’m assuming you’ve all read about Mayor Richard’s 11th hour $300k contract to High Performance Goverment (sic) Network Corp to provide “training” to the city.
The fact that the mayor can push a 3 year $95k contract out the door without council approval is appalling. Keep in mind that council must approve expenditures over $100k but can the mayor really push out multi-year deals that exceed that amount? What would’ve stopped him from awarding a 100 year $95k/year contract? Obviously if the contract total is more than $100k then it should need approval.
Another disturbing part of this transaction is that the President of this organization, Ryan Chasey, had a direct working relationship with the mayor - he was his former Quality Director and Public Finance Officer. The JG sort of picked up on this when they identified Chasey as a “former city employee”. But he was much more than some run of the mill employee as he was tied in at the very highest level. This is the kind of revolving door we do not want in our city government.
Just look at what happened on it’s face:
The mayor gives a last minute $300k contract to a former employee who heads a non-profit that he essentially created. Could there be a more blatant case of conflict of interest? The city council should move to immediately void this contract. If the current mayor wants to renegotiate the deal and get council approval then so be it but we simply cannot create a revolving door environment where political cronies benefit at the expense of the taxpayers - especially when we face a massive budget shortfall…
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