Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Thanks a lot, DAPC, for this fine mess you've left us

By CAL BEVERLY
Publisher

Consider these fictitious, hypothetical situations:

The City Council hires a police chief and city judge and agrees that as part of their pay packages they get a cut of traffic fines. In addition, the chief gets a rent-free office in the police department to set up his own privately owned bail bonding business.

Or this: As part of the pay package of the city building inspector, the inspector gets to keep a percentage of the license fees and inspection fees charged by his office.

Or this: The city recreation department director pockets a portion of all the city youth league fees and rec class fees. In addition, the rec department head sets up a rent-free sports shop in the Kedron rec center with a batting cage. Every kid who plays youth baseball on city fields must pay the rec director to practice in his for-profit batting cage.

Do you suppose somebody ought to get fired or go to jail for these activities? Of course, all these are fictitious scenarios, completely out of the realm of outrageous possibility.

Or this: The publicly-paid executive director of the development authority gets a specific-dollar cut of every tennis lesson taught at the city-owned tennis center. All league teams are required to take tennis lessons. Plus the director owns a monopoly pro shop rent-free in the city-owned facility and uses development authority employees to run the for-profit shop for his benefit.

Oops. That's not hypothetical. That's going on right now, in broad daylight, with the smiling approval of an appointed city authority and past benevolent city councils.

How could this happen, right under our noses? How could ex-Mayor Bob Lenox, ex-City Councilman Robert Brooks, now a member of the Development Authority of Peachtree City, the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce, DIRECT PAC, state Rep. Lynn Westmoreland and assorted former office holders and office seekers how could they ever have given their approval to such a poorly managed, blatantly unethical, possibly even illegal, sweetheart arrangement?

Does the blatancy of the activity lessen its stench? Is it OK to disregard laws and ethical codes so long as you are a mover and shaker in Peachtree City and your intent is to provide an appropriate amenity for 600 members of your publicly-owned club?

It seems that so long as one is doing something "for the good of Peachtree City," one expects to get away with actions for which any rural county commissioner or podunk city official would instinctively know would get him thrown in jail.

I've heard the argument that such arrangements are common with pro shops across the country. Well, yes, in privately owned country clubs.

In most places I know, life gets more complicated when you are dealing with public facilities, public officials, public money. A new set of very understandable rules comes into play. Unless it's in Peachtree City. That's different. For some, only good intentions matter there, not law and ethics.

And these are all good people. Well, yes. But, like in the game of tennis, the rules apply to good people too. Tennis is a game of exact rules, specific boundary lines, unmistakable out of bounds areas.

Both the written and the unwritten rules have been broken in the tennis center scandal. The DAPC and its executive director have played all over the court and on both sides of the net and out beyond the fences, all in the name of doing good for Peachtree City.

It should never have begun, back yonder in the administration of ex-Mayor Lenox. And it is a scandal that it continues to this day, right under our noses.

A laundry list of offenses:

· Commingled public and private funds. Pay for use of a city-owned tennis court and the public fee goes into the same pot as the pro shop's sale of tennis balls and court shoes. And the accounting for the two is sloppy or nonexistent.

· No budget for years for two venues with multiple millions in income and expenses. A public body that operates for years before even asking for a budget in the past year after the city's new mayor raises a stink about it.

· Management sweetheart deals (percentages of tennis lessons, rent-free pro shop, no pro shop employees' salary expenses because that's paid for with public money) that would get public officials in other parts of the state fired or jailed.

· A multimillion-dollar expansion program with little or no basic accounting procedures involved. Scott Bradshaw, who resigned in disgust last week, charged that even more than a year later, the staff still cannot produce a coherent report of where all the public money went.

· Cost overruns of more than $500,000, most undocumented and unapproved by the managing authority, the DAPC.

· Unpaid construction and vendor bills.

· A continuing debt load of more than $1 million, with no discernible means to repay. The bank loans to DAPC from Peachtree National Bank and Region's Bank appear to be unsecured, since the DAPC does not own either the Fred Brown Amphitheater or the tennis center. And now the DAPC has bailed out of its management contract, tossing the overfed orphans back into the city fathers' laps. Thanks a lot, DAPC, for this fine mess you leave us taxpayers with. So who's going to pay off those DAPC bank loans? State law forbids the city from assuming the debt without a referendum.

Maybe state Rep. Westmoreland, in the midst of his run for Congress, might want to call for a special session of the legislature to retroactively undo that law, as well as the laws against public officials profiting from private transactions with their public employer. You remember Westmoreland unilaterally undertook to rewrite state law earlier this year to allow the DAPC to continue to manage the two facilities, despite Mayor Steve Brown's urging to take the facilities from the DAPC and put it under a new sports and entertainment authority for more accountability. Wonder how Westmoreland feels about that decision now.