"Fishy" 18 Million dollar City Contract Needs to be Investigated

Goldman for Mayor - 8 June 2008 - For Immediate Release: Contact, 804-833-6313

Independent Investigatory Commission into "fishy" $18 million city contract, indeed the entire operation of the City Finance Department, now needed. .

Council's failure to do it all it could do to get to the bottom on the costly Fiasco Friday school episode "demonstrates that they are still too tied to the old failed accountability system to be trusted to getting to the bottom of what could be one of the most high-profile influence-peddling scandals in city history."

(Richmond) - Paul Goldman, candidate for Mayor, said today "that when I led the effort to get the Elected Mayor law on the 2003 referendum ballot, it was to help rid city government of the influence-peddling and special interest power-brokering that had too long been part of the way City Council and City Hall operated."

"I said at the time that City Council and City Hall were either incapable or unwilling to do what needed to be done in terms of preventing such abuse of the public treasury. So we needed a new broom, one I took to City Hall when I became the first person to ever demand a full, public accounting of the millions in public money spent on another project, my suspicions later proven true in an investigation by the City Auditor."

"Now, in a front-page RTD story, we discover that a contract for $18.4 has been awarded to an out-of-state company for "work that most local governments handle themselves" according to reporter David Ress."

"As the only person running for Mayor with a Masters in Public Administration, I am greatly concerned about what has now been revealed by Mr. Ress."

In a statement, Mr. Goldman continued:

One member of Council said the work "could easily be handled in-house" according Mr. Ress' story, adding that Councilman Bruce Tyler, an architect, said "the proposed cost of the contract is far above what's normal for project management".

In commenting on the fees at issue, the "amount was just ridiculous," said Council President William J. Pantele as quoted by Mr. Ress."

So my MPA training makes me ask: What is really going on here?

We all also discovered this morning that the City Finance Office concedes it was "also trying to basically use this as a model for how the city may do all of its business down the road" leaving open the question as to what other public operations have been conducted in this manner by City Hall in conjunction with other people who have similar kinds of connections as mentioned in the Ress story.

It is now also clear our school children have suffered do to the failure of City Hall and City Council to clean-up the mess they have created over the years.

While City Hall and City Council will likely engage once again in another round of finger-pointing over this latest revelation, the fact is we have a "fishy", unprecedented contract raising serious questions about influence-peddling and special interest power-brokering in the spending of millions of public dollars that neither has saw fit to fully investigate to date.

Sadly, it is therefore necessary to conclude that we need to create as soon as possible a Independent Investigatory Commission mandated to get to the bottom of this $18 million contract and the operations of the City Finance Office. If our current elected leaders are unwilling to create one, then I promise the following to the people of Richmond: If elected Mayor, I will use my authority under the Elected Mayor law that I wrote to authorize such an investigation, giving it's members full access to all City Hall documents, and mandating them to write a report that let's their investigative chips fall wherever they may.
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