Is this where all the tax money goes?

One of the many things that annoys me about the Board of County County Commissioners (BOCC) and their partner (in crime), the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority (FKAA), is their tendency to shove things down the memory hole.  So I keep a running list of unresolved issues.  I followed up on two of those things just recently.  I copied members of Keys media.  We’ll see if anything pops up in the newspaper.  I’m especially interested to see what half-baked cover story the Citizen might come up with.  The things they react to and how they spin them are instructive sometimes.  After all, the Citizen more or less functions as the county/FKAA propaganda arm.

The first forgotten issue is Bob Dean’s residency.  Here’s a link to some background, and here’s a link to my email, which was sent to the FKAA board.  No response yet.  Weird.  It’s such an easy, straightforward request.

Please let me know what you heard from the governor’s office.

How much time would it take to write back and say “nothing”?  Or “yes, here’s the response”?  It would take no time at all.  Besides this is a significant issue.  It goes straight to the heart of the FKAA board’s integrity.  This is something the board should want cleared up one way or another.  Yet they’ve allowed it to fester for a year and a half.

I have reason to believe that the letter was never actually sent.  I asked the governor’s office for the documents through a public records request.  They claimed not to have them.  So why did the FKAA board, particularly Cara Higgins, make such a huge deal of this and then let it drop?  There was a a public hearing.  It was recorded.  This is extremely unusual for the FKAA, who usually manages to avoid public scrutiny.  Lawyers were waving their arms and making spectacles of themselves.  So after all that drama, why not even a follow-up?  By the way, I can’t find Higgins’s profile on the FKAA’s fancy, new website.  Maybe someone ought to do a welfare check.  I hope she’s alright.

The second item is the county’s failure to properly advertise the sale of the Hickory House property.  Here’s a link to my two emails.  The county seems perfectly okay with the fact that taxpayers took a $1 million loss on this transaction.  Strange, isn’t it?  They get so upset about far less consequential matters.

Legal issues aside, after repeatedly failing to secure a decent offer by advertising in local newspapers, why not cast a wider net?  Oh well, I guess we can’t lose sight of what’s really important here.  Pritam Singh got a great deal at tax payer expense thanks to the county’s incompetence (or corruption?).  That’s all that really matters…to the BOCC anyway.

So those are the two old, unresolved issues.  I submitted another information request, which will probably become another “down the memory hole” victim.

I asked Rhonda Haag to provide a “sources and uses” report for the canal demonstration projects.  I want to know how much the projects cost and how they will be paid for.  She did respond in order to ask a follow-up question, but nothing since.  Certainly, Ms. Haag has this information at her finger tips.  She would be negligent if she did not.  Then again, if you find me a county official who isn’t negligent I’ll find you a leprechaun with a pot of gold.