The Downtown Morristown "Millennium Square" transportation grant is a poster child for conflicts of interest and bid shopping in a federal/state grant. It is also a primer on how to get away with and be rewarded for fraud and waste in the use and abuse of taxpayer dollars.
Red flags were and still are evident within the project and almost everything and everyone involved.
It was not enough for the Millennium Square Partners (MSP) that the taxpayers were going to fund $1.2 Million of construction and improvements on their private property. It was not enough that the taxpayers would be building privately-owned retail shells for MSP. It was not enough that the taxpayers would be building a parking deck that would be used by customers and employees of the businesses located in the Millennium Square Office building.
Follow the money...but when greed enters the equation, it is never enough.
In the video above, David Wild of Millennium Square Partners appears before the Morristown City Council on February 5, 2013. Councilman Brooks, who had exposed conflicts of interest in December 2010 that had prevented Wild from bidding on the Millennium project, had found out a few weeks before this video that the MSP group was 7-9 months delinquent in reimbursing the City for payments made by the City to the Millennium architects Brewer, Ingram & Fuller (BIF). Brooks also discovered that the Millennium Square Partners, including David Wild and City auditor James Craine, had not paid interest on these delinquent payments as provided in the City-MSP contract.
[Under the City-MSP contract, the City would pay the BIF invoices and then bill MSP for reimbursement. If MSP failed to reimburse the City within 30 days, MSP would have to pay interest.]
About a week to ten days before Wild's 2/5/13 appearance before the Council, Mayor Danny Thomas had asked City Administrator Tony Cox to take care of collecting all delinquent payments and interest due the City (taxpayers) by MSP. Wild met with Mayor Thomas, and just a few days before Wild spoke to council on 2/5/13, MSP had paid the delinquent billings but not the interest due to the city taxpayers.
[In a later post, we will find that City Administrator Tony Cox knew that MSP was not paying amounts billed to it by the City and that Cox was actively involved in directing that the City refrain as long as possible from paying BIF invoices and/or from sending City invoices to the MSP partners seeking reimbursement from MSP.]
In his statement to the Council, Wild tells councilmembers that the "plan" at the start of the Millennium project was for his firm--Wild Building Contractors--to take all the $1.2 Million Transportation Enhancement (taxpayer) grant funds and build the privately-owned retail shells on the land owned by the Millennium Square Partners and build a parking deck on top of the retail shells.
The parking deck would be called a "greenway trailhead" to qualify for the grant money but only two of the 22-23 parking spaces would be marked for trailhead parking. The rest of the parking spaces would be used as parking for customers and/or employees of the businesses in the Millennium Square Office building that happens to be a hundred feet or so from the taxpayer-funded Millennium Square parking deck.
Wild complains that the "plan" to let him build his taxpayer-funded retail shells and his taxpayer-funded (public) parking spaces next to his Millennium Square Office building was derailed by individuals who refused to remain silent--as the City and the architect did--about his conflicts of interest.
The oldest tactic in the book is "blame the messenger." Ironically, people who have to resort to blaming the messenger--as Wild does--typically do so because they can't handle the truth of the message. Instead of blaming the messenger for interfering with his "plan," Wild should have simply acknowledged that it was his actions and his multiple conflicts of interest in the project that caused TDOT to rule that he could not put on a Wild Building Contractors hat and make the conflicts go away.
The carefully contrived "plan" that Wild speaks so glowingly about was not going to save a penny of taxpayer-funded grant dollars. It was just going to set up a bid-rigging where Wild would use all the taxpayer/grant dollars budgeted for the construction and do so by not charging (himself) overhead and profit.
Competitive bidding requires that all bidders be put on a level playing field. While he may not have realized it, Wild's explanation of the initial "plan" is an open admission that he had a bidding advantage as a member of the MSP and there was an uneven playing field for other bidders. Wild's explanation also serves as an admission that the individuals who saw, spoke out, and stopped the conflicts of interest at the core of the Millennium grant were right all along.
There are people who, like Wild, believe that grant money is somehow "free money" that is different from direct locally-taxed funds, that accountability is just a word, and that blaming the messenger is the best tactic to use when you're caught with one or more hands in the cookie jar.
Fortunately, there are more and more people who have decided enough is enough and who are willing to step forward in their communities to stop waste and sweetheart deals.
Still more conflicts in the project...
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