The Cambridge Chronicle is steamed:
Mayor Ken Reeves, whose office promised more transparency this week, slapped the Chronicle with a $167 bill to find out how Reeves spent more than $40,000 in taxpayer money in six months of cross-country travel. The charge includes $4 for photocopies and about $63, the bi-hourly rate for the mayor’s assistant, to itemize Reeves’ travel expenses. But the most expensive charge is paid directly to Reeves, who is charging the Chronicle $100, at $50 per hour, to black out “exempt information that is not subject to disclosure,” according to a letter from Arthur Goldberg, one of the city’s lawyers.
Commentary at the Chronicle’s blog has been rather, er, negative toward the Mayor.
The piece concludes:
This is not the first time Reeves’ city-funded mayoral expenses have come under scrutiny.
When Reeves served as mayor in 1994, the Chronicle reported that Reeves failed to account for hundreds of expenses he billed to his city-issued credit card. State auditors opened an investigation questioning whether Reeves had filed his 1992 state income taxes.
Also during that time, Reeves proclaimed it was not his fault that he was overpaid more than $30,000 from the city for three years. The FBI then began an investigation after the Chronicle reported on his failure to report the overpayment.
Kudos to the Fourth Estate. No word yet from the Mayor, it appears, although alert readers please update.
Office of the Inspector General
John W. McCormack State Office Building
One Ashburton Place, Room 1311
Boston, MA 02108
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REPORTS OF FRAUD, WASTE, OR ABUSE
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Individuals are welcome to contact the Office with information regarding fraud, waste, and abuse. It is the Office’s practice to maintain the names of complainants in confidence. You may provide information anonymously.
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The Office’s 24-hour hotline number is 800-322-1323.
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this is what happens when you dont directly elect your mayor or city councilors, dealing, 10% mandates, etc. ensure that extremists win, sensible candidates loose, and patronage rules. When will the city wake up, ditch Plan E and ditch PR?
i think this is a lot of hot air and baloney, meant to elicit more or less the reaction it did. i haven’t followed the story for a while, even though it’s right up my alley, just because work has been nuts to the power of crazy.
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but i think the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. the chronicle has a reputation for going after really, really, really easy stories – stories that require someone to go to an office in city hall and ask for some documents. my guess is they got a whisper about reeves doing a lot of traveling, did the requisite document request, and are milking it for all it’s worth and so, so much more.
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the first indication i had of this was in the chronicle’s first blog post on the issue, in which they intoned, menacingly, that reeves’s travel budget was approved by the city without any debate. my gosh, virtually everything in cambridge city council is approved without any debate. city budget, vote on the police commissioner, decision to annex boston – you name it, it’s almost all done by unanimous consent. the chronicle knows much better than to suggest that unanimous consent on an issue implies some kind of sinister conspiracy.
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reeves has a consituency which on the whole doesn’t read the chronicle much (young couples do not on the whole spend their time reading that stuff, present company excluded.) he is also in a fairly vulnerable position, having come in last in the 2005 balloting. he is also, as you might guess, no favorite of the chronicle. so i think they’re trying to whack him in advance of the 2007 elections.
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all that being said, if reeves is indeed abusing city funds, he should stop. i think the amount of money we’re talking about is fairly small potatoes, especially when compared to some of the bigger items that have run across the council’s agenda in recent months without nearly as much attention from the chronicle. in october the council outright bought a $2 million building and gave it to the dance complex wholesale! that may or may not have been a wise decision, but the chronicle spent about 1/4th of the energy on that issue as they are on reeves’s $50k travel budget.
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Speaking of fraud: The new police station at 125 Sixth Street will cost $49,500,000 of which $30,000,000 was paid to CEM Realty Trust the original owner of 125 Sixth Street. At the time of the sale CEM had lost their only tenant with the collapse of the Telco industry. In other words, the building was completely vacant and had been renovated for a use that was virtually obsolete. However, in 2005, the City of Cambridge bailed out the owners for a price nobody in commercial real estate would pay ($312 psf) and the police assumed a $20,000,000 renovation bill because the building did not conform to the requirements of a police station. Coincidently, the owners of CEM development are former Cambridge City Assessor Charles Laverty and Cambridge based real estate developer Paul Lohnes (617 864-0097). Something clearly smells fishy and it’s at the expense of Cambridge taxpayers.
That way, it is more likely to attract discussion, since it is on a different subject.