Opinion: The Northwest’s Dirty Laundry

The mayor’s office certainly broke with precedent last week when he had his Integrity Officer, Joan Markman announce she had been doing an investigation into the back-channel activities of Dwight Evans and members of the School Reform Commission into alleged strong-arming to make sure a contract to run the Martin Luther King school went to Foundations Inc, a well-connected local New Jersey firm that gave regular campaign contributions to Appropriations Chairman Evans over the last four years.

Of course, Foundations has been the recipient of nearly $9 million in contracts and apparently Dwight wanted that to continue despite failing performance at the school and a decision from parents and school administrators who had selected a qualified replacement.  This newspaper reported these sordid details and the amount of campaign contributions in April while the shakedown was taking place, but any outcry was quickly covered up and coverage elsewhere was minimal. (See the March 31 editorial outlining school and other failures in the use of public money affiliated with Evans and others).

What is most amazing about this information that just made aggressive headlines in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is that it reflects a 180 degree change in policy from the top. Did someone have pangs of conscience all of sudden?  For it has been the policy of this political machine-driven administration to help cover up fraud and misuse of public money, not expose it. When was the last time a department or agency of the city government exposed or prosecuted anything that was related to how our elected officials have spent money, made crony-based appointments, or misused authority?  If any of that was done, (and little was) it had to come from outside of the city or state government as the internal watchdogs don’t hunt and don’t bite.  At one time the Inquirer did serious investigative reporting, but that is no longer the case. Now, they only report municipal failure once they get the go-ahead from the machine; as happened here.

Were it not for the release of this information through the mayor’s office, there would have been no clamor or outrage about this clear example of pay-to-play and power triumphing over the public will.

City Council confirmed that within 24 hours of  Ms. Markman’s expose with members going on the record with statements of “So What” and “That is how we do things here all the time” - - and of course they are correct. And when it comes to where it takes place and the degree of fraud and cover up, the Northwest may actually lead the way with some of the worst examples in our own back yard. There is little happening to make a resident think anything will change despite incumbent new leadership after the November election.

Dwight Evans’s history of funding failure is a long list that includes the North by Northwest nightclub, Ogontz Grille, Weaver’s Way Ogontz, New Media School fraud, the million dollar Jazz Festival funding and a long list of underperforming charter schools with some of the worst records in the state.  Despite many of these situations being reported as they failed, only the New Media fraud saw legal challenges and that was because the FBI got involved.  No local or state action was taken as those entities have long been told to “lay off” when the connections lead to our elected leadership.  For 25 years and even today, the longest running, highest dollar one-person fraud in the city has been exempt from prosecution, although two investigations lay dormant at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.  Of course that is the Germantown Settlement, a 30-corporation conglomerate that began as a social service organization and wound up being the largest real estate monopoly in Germantown, as well as the distributor of  public money without even basic compliance with the law.  Our City Controller knows all about it (actually helped it along for a period) and our City Inspector General did an extensive investigation that was ended through the efforts of Mayor Nutter’s newly-appointed Inspector General Amy Kurland  who took office at the beginning of his term of office. The fact that the largest investigation run by Seth Williams as IG was terminated and buried should outrage the public as the total misuse of public money and city assets in that case may approach or exceed half a billion dollars.  But you see, the practice prior to this recent “epiphany” was to bury, not disclose, wrongdoing at every level.  Once one starts peeling back the onion, it leads to the very obvious question of “Who approved all those federal, state and city dollars?” that were spent illegally, transferred to private dealings, or just went away with no required records filed for years on end.  The answer to those questions are the names of every elected senior official in the Northwest with appropriations authority and responsibility.

Are we about to be the recipients of a “download” of the years of dirty laundry pent up in the Northwest?  Or was this just the unintended result of an internal struggle between the mayor and Arlene Ackerman as she leaves the School Board with a million dollar skim from the public treasury on top of the largest salary of its type in the nation?  If no additional investigative work follows we will know this was an intended distraction to deflect from the Ackerman payoff.

Frankly, I think some folks are getting nervous, and they should be. No one knows how far the federal investigation into the Carl Greene PHA matter is going, but we do know that, despite their push-back, records of the most connected law firms in this city have been subpoenaed, and those law firms have been involved in more than one questionable activity and have the done handiwork of city and state officials in and out of trouble for years. It should  be mentioned that members of his own party jettisoned Dwight Evans from the Chair of the Appropriations Committee when he would have termed out in month anyway.  Someone was sending a message.

Right this minute more of the same is taking place in our beloved Northwest, home of 30 years of municipal development, corruption and fraud, in the form of the Chelten Plaza project, done in the dark, by the same folks using $4 million of your money for an insider-arranged fast profit no-future project on a key site.  You can still be part of stopping and redirecting this one.  Call everyone from the Governor and U.S. Congressman on down and tell them that the Northwest wants no more of the same.  Then ask the Attorney General of the United States to come here and clean up your town.  The dirty laundry has been piling up for too long. 

"Great is truth, but from a practical point of view, is silence about the truth"

Aldous Huxley -

foreward to Brave New World, 1946 

 

Jim Foster

Editor/Publisher