ISSUE # 2 ... THE RED ANT
August 18 Mayor Gets it Wrong. Hospital, School Get it Right.
Single women listen closely when men use the "commitment" word. So this one did not get past us---
Mayor Ireland recently stunned some citizens as he announced at a meeting on August 8th that the Hospital and the School Board had made "commitments for a number of units at Burlingame II at FULL COST." I was more than a little peeved to think that the leadership of those publicly funded organizations would write multi-million dollar blank checks when the per unit cost is unknown but expected to be well over $500,000. How could responsible board members even consider creating such sky's-the-limit liability, especially given the known fiscal mismanagement of Burlingame? And most particularly in the case of the Hospital, which has just recovered from its own issues of confounding debits and credits! This announcement seemed hardly consistent with the seriousness with which those board members appear to take their fiduciary duties. Surely the zeal for employee housing had not so overshadowed their common sense!
First stop: City Hall, with a formal (Colorado Sunshine Law) records request for documentation of those Burlingame II "commitments." The official written response came from Steve Barwick, City Manager, stating Mayor Ireland was speaking of those boards' "verbal commitments." Little comfort there. Would those boards really have given their word, absent cost estimates and due diligence?