OLD RULES versus NEW RULES
To City Council –
Bainbrige Island, Washington
9-12-08
This letter is in response to a request of a council member(s) as a result of my statements at a CRC meeting about the history of the Hotel Motel Grant and a Community Internet Site. I am trying to get as much information to you as fast as I can about the history in our community as it relates to Government, Hotel/Motel Tax, other events, and an effort of the last 16 years to establish a Community Web Site on Bainbridge Island.
I have assembled the following from some previous emails, added much that is new and I am in a rush. You will have to forgive typos, grammar and maybe a missed incoherent sentence. It is almost midnight, and I am trying to get this to you before the Council meeting (Note: this version 9-19-08 is a refinement of the first letter). What is here will be refined further and perhaps divided into subjects in a website(s) with much more information.
I have in mind, here, to mix in many events on the County, State, Federal and even on an international level.
In the interest of refining what went to council I am posting it in it's full version. For readability on teh iInternet in the future I will break it down by subject.
A bit of mixed history...
I am including two attachments. One of them references the current traffic generated just as a base reference to the value of a community site. The other tells of a significant window of opportunity for this community to accept my community website model, one that I created but which was killed (as usual) by deliberate inaction by government leadership. The significant portions of the letter include a reference to, “Big developers who want to score in the race to capture market share will be attracted to Bainbridge's demographics and location - and a passive position by community leaders will result in an electronic strip mall.” This was an amazing prophetic statement that came true years later with the ISP Channel event and the most shocking thing of all, it had the help of our City, mayor, Downtown Association, Chamber and Arts and Humanities to the detriment of our local businesses if it had succeeded. I was the lone voice of reason and warning. I was able to fend them off based on my ability to recognize what in a community these companies would want and have years to prepare for there arrival.
Even more spectacular was the offer of a Washington DC Beltway company to help secure Federal Funding to create a pilot project here on Bainbridge and Kitsap County. All this based on my presentations and actual successes I could show them from years of creation of a community web site. I had to go back to them and decline their offer because no one in leadership in this community would come forward to participate and accept the gift. I had distributed their letter to all. Thus another window of opportunity opened and shut with a slam.
The last effort to work with the City resulted in
me attending several Community Relations meetings run by Vancil and
Scales. I was quite often the only one at the meetings. I
laid out several things that I had accomplished over the years.
I submitted letters from people saying what a great site I had
created, etc. This was in preparation for a tourism round table
sponsored by the City. All the usuals were invited, but the
Community Network was specifically excluded. This, even though the
Internet is the most significant thing to happen in tourism in recent
history. (Just note what this round of grant applications will be
about. More tearing down of a community web site).
And yet, I
was even denied “the mike” during public comment at the
meeting by Vancil. This was under the guise of running out of time.
However, a review of Vancil’s history of grant interactions
involving friends, family and other organizations (in which she is
involved) paints a definite picture.
This was the last time I
wasted my time with City officials who I believe were corrupt or
unethical.
At that tourism round table, sat three of the four
people who, a few months earlier, sat on the grant review board
(these three had refused my grant). If memory serves me the three
were the Lodging Assoc. (Motel Manager), Downtown Assoc. (Chris
Beatie) and Arts and Humanities (Nancy Fry). At the round table, it
was concluded it was a good idea to develop itineraries--things to
do--for visitors to Bainbridge Island. And, this was the purpose
and content of my grant.
Van
administered the grant that year on behalf of CRC , and I had a chat
with her at the grocery store some time later and told her some of
the history and conflicts of interest with the people who sat on that
board. At the end she exclaimed, "That's why they
didn't want me to give you a reason for refusing your grant".
Bob Scales rewrites the Hotel Motel Tax Preamble
This leads us to Scales rewriting the preamble to the grant to make what
was potentially criminal (the Raid on the Hotel/Motel Tax) into
something passably legal. (This rewrite was the one Chris Snow gave
a glowing report about at the last CRC meeting). The rewrite
also was customized to make it easier to exclude a “Community
Web Site” from even applying for the grant. It was discussed
at a committee meet for about an hour and a quarter. Many
witnesses were there (even Wini and Nancy Fry). As I remember it, a
line that was added allowed the City to exclude anyone from applying
for the grant at the City's discretion; and, as I verified with
Scales at the time, the City didn't even have to give a reason for
excluding the applicant.
I asked Scales for a copy of the
rewrite about a week later, when I ran into him. He couldn't
remember what document I could be talking about. I will dissect
Scales document that didn't exist at a later date, bouncing it off
history and the papers file for investigation of the “Raid on
the Hotel/Motel Tax”. You will see a connection and common
thread.
The AG's office defines the refusal of an elected official to provide public information as malfeasance. This notion of refusing to provide public information was evidenced at the next grant hearing when I asked Bill Knoblock whether this rewrite was ever voted on by council and he couldn't recall doing it. This will be an excellent story for the Coalition on Open Government. I also submitted a written request to the mayor’s office, and a week later I was handed a one page piece of ancient boilerplate that was totally irrelevant. The staff person who gave it to me seemed to know the paper was irrelevant, also. This will not only be part of the hotel/motel tax story, but a feature in a section of the Realgovernment.org project on "Techniques governments uses to disables it's citizens".
The sad thing is there is no mechanism to deal
with this conduct in the City structure. (Even the so called ethics
ordinance is so full of intentional holes it is useless. I was
told by the ethics committee that their year’s worth of work
was gutted one back-room night by Scales and Rolfis in response to
opposition by Vancil and the City's employees union, just to get what
little was left passed.)
The Matrix of Influence
These names and organizations will only mean something to those who know something about Bainbridge Island with some references to county, state and federal. There functions and methods will be found in every community.
There is much more: Barry Peters and his wife stories, Chris Snow, Darline, Vancil, Scales, Toolee, Dwight Sutton, Nordbie (sp), Andy Marron, Bill K, Jay Enslee, Phil Rockafeller, Leta, Cristen Rolfis, Liz M, Jim L, Kevin D., Jack McArthure, Merrill, Jeff Brien, Chris Beatie, Wendy Johnson, Marret Salterness, Gary Winter, Ross Thomas, Wini, Mickie M, Nancy Fry, Arts & Humanities, Chamber, Team Winslow, BIEDC –these people and many others are all connected in a matrix of influence. When woven together over thirty years (especially the last sixteen) with stories of the ISP Channel, State Ethics Board, Ethics ordinance, Comcast Franchise, Hotel/Motel Tax, EDC meetings, the Chuck Cole story, Raid on Hotel Tax, BIB, BITV, BIDA and other people and events, it will clearly show the depth and breadth of the "Viral Nature of Unethical Leadership" and the corruption that has keep a community from thriving as it could. Not all the above represent negative influences but some are strategically used by negative influences. The story is one of the creation of the underlying culture, the culture that either makes a community unique or like others under similar influence. It also forms a network I refer to as “The Matrix of Influence” within a community and can be mapped out (another facinating project to be refined). Typically, in these networks, ethics is considered a hinderance.
I hope to show that the true nature of a community is the foundation for its structure that ether enable its citizens or more the norm, disables them. This foundation, if ill-advised, can destroy innovation, pioneering spirit and environmentalism in the community as demonstrated by the 16 year story of bainbridgeisland.org. The reason I am pushing so hard at this moment is that we are in an economic crisis at this time that could last as long as ten years. There is value in a community site to help mitigate the debilitating financial affects of a major economic crisis. But ethical leadership must emerge to make this happen.
Editor Note: As of the moment of this edit... Yesterday Friday, 9-19-08 the greatest finacial bailout in history happened. Not just of the US but by extension the worlds economic systems took place.
“In the days leading up to Black Thursday, 1929 the market was severely unstable. Periods of selling and high volumes of trading were interspersed with brief periods of rising prices and recovery.” (Ref. Wikipedia)
Sound familiar.
I walked around Winslow today, farmers markets, lots of people buying lattes at the bakery, etc. Totally oblivious to the fact that if the world didn't come together for the bailout, we would have woken Monday morning to the repeat of the great crash of 1929 and the start of another great depression only on a global scale. And we are not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.
I wanted to shout “wake up!”
Oh,
yea. The Chamber just had their monthly luncheon. “The State
of Our Schools, featuring School
Superintendent Faith Chapel”.
That's important but I want to say to the Chamber what Bill Clinton
told Bush senior when they ran against each other... “It's the
economy stupid”.
I'll tell you another story some day about the Chamber running an article in their monthly newsletter about “retail sales leakage in catalog sales” when I was giving a talk in another community about the rapid growth of Internet sales (e-leakage as I called it, coined a new word) and the erosion of tax base in this State and all others. (they won't let me talk in this community).
On with the story...
MIT Community Study - 1995
I
can also statistically demonstrate a site like mine’s potential
financial benefit to the community, by referring to an MIT study
published in 1995. The study stated that in 2-3 years a
community site project they did (just like mine) produced 20%
increase in revenue in a depressed community. You can imagine
how much greater that percentage might be today in our healthy
community with its high Internet use. Multiply that by the
retail sales in Bainbridge over, say 13 years (3 years from my 1992
start) and you will have a conservatively low value of millions of
dollars stolen from the businesses of this community by it's leaders
(scary to look at it this way, huh?). I have a local
witness (who will surprise you) to the study’s information. I
personally met with the author of the study in 1995 and compared
notes with him. I was right on track. The difference
between us? He had $100,000 dollar grant to start with. I had
$40,000 of my life's savings. He had ethical leadership the in
the test community, we have corrupt leadership. His community
became the model of the "Unified Community Project," and it
was up and functioning in 2 years. We became the model the
"Fragmented Community Project". It was up and
functioning in 2 years but has been crippled and disabled at every
window of opportunity that has been presented to community leadership
for 16 years. (He told me an important thing I have never
forgot: “You have to find central leadership to pull everyone
together, the city.” I never did and we have the fragmented
community project as a result.)
Even though successful on many fronts in spite of the opposition, my project was way too costly and developed into only a fraction of what it could have been, by now. We were plagued by those who copied, even stole, the intellectual property that created our community site—people who shared the intellectual property with all. I t is a story that will be repeated. It demonstrates the need for ethical leadership which brings us to a repeat of that history today with Micky and the Lodging association and their $30K grant. Knowing the group selected to be on the grant committee, it is history repeated. Without even seeing the grant for $20K, I can guarantee the purpose and scope of the grant will include things I have brought to this community in the past, applied for in grants, shared with mayors and councils and even presented to Mickie and Wini.
(Out of all the thousand of presentations I
have given, Wini Jones is the only person at the end of the
presentations who said, “There was nothing I was doing that was
of any value.” Years later she and Mickie want me to give the
community site to them and BIB.)
Creation of the “Boat Yard” opportunity...
Add to this, the billions of dollars that
could have been generated for the region (especially Bainbridge
Island) that would have been created by a Mystic
Seaport at the Ferry maintenance yard. Seattle
Chamber, coast guard came through the site many times and even an
admiral emailed me. And the admiral said he thought he could get
support from the navy for the project. Port Townsend was in touch
about coordinating projects. A Beltway company wanted in on
developed projects like this all over the world. I launched the
project when I did to support an effort in Olympia to move the
maintenance yard to Bremerton. The Sun newspaper did a great article
on it--full page. I billed it as a "Jewel of Puget Sound
Project". I was demonstrating the ability of a
community site to create something in virtual space and have it
become real in the world.
And yet, there was not a word of support from the City, Chamber, Downtown Association, Arts and Humanities or Economic Development Council of Bainbridge Island, except for a bit part by Merril. (In fact, Arts and Humanities did an end run on the project. Even though invited to join the effort, they lobbied the State behind the scenes to use the big building not as a maritime element but an arts center). Lots of support from the public and talented volunteers were coming out of the woodwork. We would have gotten our boatyard back. (By the way, I believe there is an important story, here, about the council that gave all this away and about the hypocrisy of those who later tried to sue the State). It was happening in spite of Bainbridge Island. The only thing that killed it (and it might have survived if our leaders had supported it) was that Tim Iman’s I-695 passed. That law rolled back the car tabs tax, a tax that contributed a big chunk to the Ferry System budget. The plan to move the yard came to a halt.
There was one councilman who spoke out in favor of the Boatyard project at the time and was quoted in the newspaper article, It was Merrill. Problem was, it was a little talk and not much action. However, Merril was in part behind a coupe of EDC to take the project from the Boating Community. But I do want to give him credit for what he did try and do the first time.
I will continue this story later and tell about when the boating community came together at another window of opportunity just for the boatyard only and when they organized a public support event where 82 people showed up. There was no support from the community leadership (with one exception below). And, a month or so later, the EDC tried to hijack the project from the boating community (as some of their members did with BITV) and move it in under the Chamber of Commerce, even though we included the Chamber Manager (Kevin Dwire) in our organizing committee.
City Waste and the Internet
Then I
will talk about the subject of waste, such as the City spending an
estimate $300,000 (staff time is the variable but it was huge) on a
web site they had to throw away despite the fact that I tried guide
them down the right path. I could have pointed to a free city
site software package developed by a subsidiary of IBM to get them
started, but they would have none of it. The great irony is, I
recommended two local people I thought would be competent enough to
build a site--one was Bruce Kelton. We worked together on
projects. He did the Fire Dept. site. The other was Jane
Lindley (whom they did hire in the end). My personal interest
was not to build their site (which they should have) but to have the
City as an integral component of a community site as well and they
would benefit from the public relations, community outreach
components and shared infrastructure. There was much to coordinate
and my years of experience could have saved them time, money and kept
them out of trouble. I will tell you about Washington Website
Services some time and about how they lost me one of my best client
through their incompetence. The city didn't want to hear it.
It all becomes part of the cost and waste created by the city
leadership. When you compare all this to what I have
accomplished with little to no resources and in the face of great
opposition it makes a very inspiring story. Probable the most
valuable thing I own anymore.
Lodging Association Story...
I live
in poverty today, a situation I never thought I would see, because of
the leaders of this community. One of the stories I will tell
is how it took me three years of working with the B&Bs to get
them online. (Merrill is a witness to the event, as he was a
Councilman, Chamber booster, Hotel/Motel grant founder and B&B
owner). Mickey Mulnair helped, in the end, as the B&B
liaison (she wanted to learn about web site building). We built
it under the community site. They each paid $85 for the first
year. It included hosting and building the web site.
Mickey pulled the info together from the B&B's. I built the
sites and integrated them into several good marketing locations for
visitors on the Community Network. It was a good model of how a
community site could integrate a project into many aspects of the
community represented on the site. Nothing existed like it. Out of
this effort grew their lodging association.
I split the $85 with Mickey for her effort.
It was a loss of my time but it got them going and once they
understood the value of what was created we could improve the site
and do greater things. It worked. When it came time to
renewing things for the next year, I got an email from Mickey saying
that she was going to take over the project for the B&B and it
was now her project. We had duplicate sites for a while.
I never got paid any more for what I have done from the B&Bs.
I have sent hundreds of thousand dollars worth of business to them
over the years, and I reduced their information to listings and to
links to their individual sites; because there was no monetary
feedback loop even to cover maintenance. (This is the model for what
is happening now with Micky and the Lodging association, although it
is repeated on a greater scale this time.) It is an important part
of a model of a functioning community site, so I do it.
A
year or two later I was looking at some city documents concerning the
Hotel/Motel grants and saw that Mickey had gotten a $7000 grant to
build the B&B site that year. And, as we all know, Merrill is
the godfather of the Hotel/Motel Tax grants and a B&B owner.
(I heard a while back that Merrill was telling people he made
over a 100K on his B&B. It was my efforts that started that
process, and it cost me way more than I made).
Hotel Motel Tax Grant:
Gee, we kept
blaming the State all these years (30) for forcing us to allow people
(board members and managers of organizations) to apply for a grant,
sit on the review board and vote to receive their grants. A but a
State representative just showed up and said it wasn't so. How could
we have gotten that wrong for all these years, blaming the State? It
is the “Viral Nature of Unethical Leadership.”
The culture created around the grant is the source of it, and it
spreads through out this community like a cancer. We also have
our "Typhoid Marys" who move from board to board, project
to project perpetually spreading the disease. I'll write about
the time it got so bad the City finally threw out the grant reviews
and reheard them in council committee. Christine Rolfis,
Merrill Robison and I were all first hand witnesses to this. The
review board (Chamber, Kitsap Visitor and Convention Bureau, and a
Motel manager and a B&B board member) tried to get me thrown out
of the meeting, but Merill said it was a council committee function
and it was public. You know it had to be very bad for the City
to take such an action, rather than sweep it under the rug. I have
always suspected it didn't get swept under the rug because I was
there to witness the event. Especially since they put the Chamber
manager right back on the review board. And I noted in the minutes
of the CRC committee a year later that Christine Rolfis argued hard
to reinstall the Kitsap Visitor Bureau manager thus reassembling the
most unethical duo I had ever seen.
I met privately with the Chamber manager years before, when I understood what was going on and expressed a concern of the ethics of an organization to which I belonged and paid due. His answer to my question “Why do it” was, “Because I can.” And who enabled him? The corrupt leadership of this community.
I have an interesting story about the Chamber Board. When they were confronted about a manager getting kicked off the review board and about the grants getting reheard, they dealt with the problem by saying, “We approve of what the manager does but do not accept any responsibility for his actions!” I will never forget it. I grew up in California in a community that had a mafia connection. (Our community center was a prohibition nightclub and casino. It had a great art nouveau bar, who knows I may have sipped a coke on the same bar stool the “Teflon Don” sat on. It operated after prohibition ended until the owner wound up dead in the trunk of a car in San Francisco.) I heard it said you could attend a city council meeting at the gaming tables on certain nights. It was generally known the bosses did not accept responsibilities for the actions of their men. But they approved of what they did.
This seems to be what Bainbridge Island has
become.
I always like the term "Appearance of
Fairness Doctrine." From observation of practice it's real
meaning, to me, is: "It doesn't have to be fair or ethical.
Just has to appear that way."
Getting to more recent history and the ISP
Channel ...
Barry has told me things that seem to paint a
picture: This is the same scenario as the ISP Channel who tried to
acquire from me and failing that, destroy what I had accomplished
over many years, because I was in the way of one of their profit
centers. Every
business organization, the City and the Arts and Humanities helped
the actions of the ISP Channel at the time. But now the
current threat is internal.
My proposals over the years have involve a "unified" community events calendar, things for visitors to do--basically, an improvement to what I have already done, improved dining directories, expanded connections with the B&Bs, improvement of the marina District project (which both the Chamber and the Review have taken advantage of). And there would be other things of interest that would benefit the community. But, I have been over much of this ground before in the last 16 years in presentations to mayor and council—to Christine Rolfis, Jim Llewellyn, Dwight Sutton, Lin Nordbie, Louis Curtis, Liz Murry, to Chambers and the Downtown Organizations and their board members and many, many others. Christine and Jim were on board with my plan, as was Darline, in her time (which I will get to). Christine even saw connections to the potential I showed her as it related to the work her husband was doing with a grant from the World Bank in Russia. I looked into it and sure enough about 2/3 of the grants they gave, I could have a component to. I did not pursue it at the time because of the cost of doing the grant and because there was a one-year process and I had questions about what the world bank does in the world. Jim and Christine both faded away and after Jim left the City the first time he told me that Dwight Sutton had told him that the City wasn't going to be part of my Community Site, because “I helped businesses”. This was also related to me by Lita, Dwight's secretary. But Cities help chambers, downtown organizations. A little later organizations (Dwight/City, Chamber and Downtown, and Arts and Humanity) went all out to promote the ISP Channel (a Palo Alto Company) on Bainbridge. So much for Dwight's ban on helping a business. Well, in a way it worked out as planned. The ISP Channel was here to mine our local economy to the detriment of our local businesses. What Dwight and Company didn't know was that the ISP Channel (through our local Cable Company and Marret Salterness, their manager) had previously offered (back room-style) to co-opt me or buy me out to use my resources to bring them in. I refused, and so they brought all of the above together to create the DiscoverBainbridge Project for the sole purpose of eliminating me (BIB, Micky and Wini were in the ISP Channels camp). (More on this later).
I survived the onslot, and the local cronies disappeared into the woodwork from the disgrace. ISP Channel went back to Palo Alto and later apologize for what they did. I thought the City might rethink my project at this time--those who now realized that a big company wanted what I had created. Micky and Wini even asked me to give BIB the Community Network once. (This and an event around the hotel/motel tax are the two events that turned Merrill to the Dark Side).
Experiment: Reaching out to political candidates before the system gets a hold of them...
Getting back to Darlene: She, Bill Knoblock and Debra Van (I believe this was the time Chris Snow saw a part of the presentations as well) were part of an experiment to reach people running for office before they become indoctrinated by the system (I gave all who wanted one a free website on the Community Network or links to their own.).
One of the biggest employers in Silverdale outside of government believed in what I was trying to do. I built them a website and in the process they gave me a desk in their office and about $6000 dollars while I worked on it and a series of power point presentations to help bring the message of community sites to the region. They even purchased a BoxLight projector (when they were expensive) for me to use (some of the finest people I have ever met). I, and all of us, owe them a debt (Pacific Northwest Title). It was one of those presentations that our leaders saw. They all got it. They all understood the value of making the Internet part of their talks to community groups. Van later was working in the telecom committees and Bill traveled to Jefferson County to sit in on a presentation I gave to about 70 members of the leadership of that county at WSU. These presentations were an experiment relating to the motivational power of the story of Bainbridge Island (more later on this).
After Darlene saw the presentation and the potential that would be gained by a community network, she excitedly said: “As soon as I get into office we will establish the Community Network.” But she hadn't run into the Bainbridge Island's good ol’ boys yet (they had another candidate), and when she did, all her campaign promises disappeared. (I was at the EDC meeting when she got the “word”).
The game has been for a while this simple: I apply for hotel/motel grants. The same core group gets to review my grants. My grants are refused for spurious reasons. After a grace period, some other grant application--a reasonable facsimile of my own idea--comes out as a good idea, this, under the auspices one of those in the core. Since they all can apply, review and recommend their own grants, they breeze right through. Or they copy something I put on the community site that I have to funded myself (which isn't as good as it might have been had I had funding). There is also a covert effort to discourage organizations and business from becoming part of the community site. (At a later date I will talk about the Chambers/Reviews “Think Globally Shop Locally” project and BIDA's recent version. And, why both papers and the Kitsap Business Journal never print anything about what I have accomplished with a community web site. The Sun did run an article about one of my projects, but it was a glossy overview subtly meant to diminish the project. It was not the real story. They even killed the press releases about my being nominated for the States Jefferson Award in 2000 (for my public service efforts.) More stories to come later about my outreach to the press, about how I could have helped them and why Net Neutrality is so important.
I have been beat down significantly all these years and made money for many, even those who try and eliminate the very thing that helps them or helps the people they represent. (I often question myself what is 16 years of a person’s life worth?)
But there are a few bright spots.
One was when a head honcho from the Kitsap EDC (Ed Stern) came to give a presentation to our EDC. He wanted to promote a consultant (Ed Bookie, Kevin knows the history). He had a power point presentation from Bookie. I had been to many KEDC meetings and had spoken to the assembly many times. In the presentation, was a small section presenting the virtues of a community site (Bookie knew the value). I was at the meeting to provide a computer to run the projector. When Ed got to the part of the presentation about the community and Internet he threw me a bone. He looked at our EDC assembly and stated flat out: “This is what Dave has been trying to do here on Bainbridge for the last 10 years”. I was watching the screen and turned to look at the group. Their faces were of stone and gazing into space. This was about the time they stopped meeting publicly and moved into the shadows. In that room were mayors and council persons, representatives of all major organizations, banks and the town’s businesses. Basically, all who sit perpetually on the hotel/motel grant review board. The net result: It simply increased the opposition to establishing my community site, while at the same time increased it's value to be stolen.
This is Bainbridge Island and who we are.
However I have another destiny in mind for you.
None of us can change the past, and I will not fake history like the Lodging Association tried the other night. I would however be willing to close the current book of “The Story of Bainbridge Island: and start a new one (I am also happy to keep the old one going but I have all the stories I need).
This may surprise you but, to help write the first chapter of the new book, I would bring in some of those who have contributed to the effort to destroy a community site (Merrill Robison, Kevin Dwire?, Gary Winter, Janet Shaw for example). There are only three people in our City leadership that can be trusted in this project. There are others that need to fade into oblivion. There are some I wouldn't mind having around, like Larry Mills (Of Mill, Cogan and Swartling) who volunteered to helped with the original nonprofit incorporation (the one I abandon after watching BIB hijack the board of BITV). Larry is known by many of the nonprofits on the island and some of the others who were part of my original advisory group.
Unlike any other organization or government on this Island that I know of, I will establish an code of ethics that all will be vetted against and held to. There are vast human resources on this Island, and I have drawn on many, but I have also seen individuals abused by the corruption and secrecy in boards of directors and by organizations who have failed to be held accountable for what they do. In fact, I will move to create a community wide code of ethics that can be used as a model for other communities. (There is a parish back east that has done something similar. Administered by a local university. Cities are certified by a program of ethics.)
Raid on Hotel/motel tax,” document
When I first acquired the “ Raid on Hotel/motel tax,” document the legal advice I received was that a grant review committee may not be held legally accountable of manipulating tax funds. The grant review committee was only advisory. But when an elected official, knowing a problem exists, still adopt the recommendations of the review board without addressing or trying to correct the problem, then they can be held accountable.
I decided to give the City a chance. I showed up at a council meeting and asked the Mayor and Council if they had passed, without comment, the grant awards as they had been submitted, and I asked them if they were they sure they wanted to do that. The Mayor polled the council and there was no question to the action. This then became public record. At that moment I was free to pass on the information I had, knowing I had provided everyone a second chance.
(I have reason to believe the State is still looking into aspects of what is going on here on Bainbridge, and yet I know they don't have the information and history I possess in the current mix.)
If Debra Van were here, she might want to share a few things about the warnings I gave her--things she ignored. She thereafter became a strong advocate for ethics in the City, but at the same time couldn't wait for her term to end.
I suggested to the CRC committee that putting the current process on hold might be a good idea, at least until more information could be provided them. It appears, however, that Barry is hell bent on fast-tracking it (and I am sure he has support).
However, in the not too distant future, I
expect great value to come from the story of the "Unethical
Fragmented Community" model that Bainbridge Island has become.