We hear release of the long-awaited Rio Nuevo audit from the Arizona Auditor General is due out today.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2010.
Rio Nuevo Audit Due
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The initial audit has been completed. It was mentioned on KOLD-TV’s evening news and a .PDF document is available from the KOLD.com website. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the city’s use of the TIF funding – surprise!
Nintz,
Caught you on the roundtable tonight with the City Manager, and have since been skimming through the audit.
A couple of Mr. Letcher’s responses really stuck out in my opinion. First, his insistence that now, with the release of the audit, is the time to “close this chapter” on Rio Nuevo and “move forward” leaving what’s happened behind “in the past” where it belongs.
Well, no Mr. Letcher, I disagree. Now would be exactly the right time to finally begin to hold people accountable for this debacle. Tucson is a mid-sized, functionally insolvent city, in a bankrupt state; whose leaders just finished making nearly a quarter of a billion taxpayer dollars disappear.
Jim, giving Mr. Letcher and the rest of our city leaders the benefit of the doubt; that they in fact, really are stupid enough to lose this much money to secure such minimal benefit; I would pose this question : Is there not a point that is reached for those to whom we’ve entrusted these resposibilities, where this much stupid, becomes criminal in and of itself?
Secondly, when queried about moving forward, Mr. Letcher dissembled into an explanation about how “complicated” it was negotiating yet another IGA. I don’t know about you, but whenever anybody begins by telling me how complicated something is I become immediately suspicious. How about this Mr. Letcher? Dispense with the implicit condescension, assume for the purposes of this conversation that we are at least as smart as you ( it is a fairly safe bet that none of us has lost a quarter of a billion taxpayer’s dollars recently), and just answer the question please.
Robert Alexander Dumas
All those who are responsible for any Rio Nuevo missteps aren’t at the City any more Robert. Feel free to pursue the witch hunt if you please just make sure you know who you are hunting and why.
Please insert “managers and administrators” before “who” and after “those” in my comment. There are still people around who are responsible but they hold different offices.
bullseye,
What’s up! Sounds a li’l bit like anxiety. You one of those culpable bureaucrats? One quarter of one billion U.S. dollars. Witch hunt? Really?