The Big Story / Lunch And Dinner With Local Reporters

 

By Rick Boettger

 

Superintendent Mark Porter just had lunch with local reporters, ostensibly to get helpful suggestions about how the school district could make their jobs easier. I don’t think so. Case in point: public record requests. As Larry Murray, former member of the audit committee and close second in his race for the school board, has extensively documented, the district has continuously refused to supply easily retrieved public records until Larry is forced to sue them.

 

 

The fact is, the superintendent has a lot of public information that embarrasses him, and he wants to hide it. Inviting the local well-behaved reporters to lunch to, ha-ha, get their ideas is what I taught in my organizational behavior classes as “false participation.” You ask your employees for suggestions, so they feel they have influence, which makes them feel happy, so they behave. Mark’s hope is that his friendly regular media will feel even more like members of his club, becoming even gentler with their Public Record Requests.

 

 

The most recent boondoggle is deciding to sue the HOB contractor for records which we were supposed to be collecting all along, but didn’t; which Steve Pribramsky in his softball, not-really-an-audit audit did collect, but which the district then dumped; and which Coastal, the contractor, now say they have produced often enough. They refuse to show them again.

 

 

I can only believe they chose Steve because the district really wanted a cover-up. Remember, Steve was a former board member, who was essentially a part of the inept financial management plaguing the district in the era of appointed superintendents. Steve not only accomplished no financial oversight in his four years, he also lost his own home to foreclosure and bought a business which went bankrupt, while he was sued by the people he bought it from for misuse of their credit line.

 

 

With all the unbiased financial talent in town, selecting Steve was simply a fake way of seeming to do an audit, while of course finding nothing. Then they lost the documents Coastal gave him. I have not seen the actual contract with Coastal nor the governing statutes, because the exhibits attached to the documents posted on the district’s website are suspiciously omitted.  I infer, then, that this is because Coastal does indeed have a case for having been open enough, and two bites at the apple were all we got.

 

 

So the lawsuit may result in more wasted legal fees and a reputation in the business community that you better charge the district more in order to fund the unjust lawsuits we’re likely to file against you. But all the district, and the board, had to do was listen to Captain Ed Davidson, Larry Murray and current audit committee chair Stuart Kessler when, at the time, they begged for normal oversight of the millions being spent on HOB construction.

 

Dining out can be much more wholesome. We took our remarkable Japanese friend, Coco Ono, the now-retired cleaning lady at our former church, to Braza Lena. They offer a $40 buffet of 12 meats and the best salad bar I’ve ever eaten. Cynthia and I now dine like birds, paying more attention to our wine as we age, and it is a complete waste for us to order a big buffet we can’t take home.

 

 

But Coco is amazing on many levels.  One is that at 75 she still has the figure, skin and hair of a woman in her 20s, while being able to eat, on special occasions, like a lumberjack. I have marveled in the past, wondering where it goes. I said, “Cynthia, let’s invite Coco to our Key West Braza Lena, and watch her take them down.”

 

 

Coco wondered if she still had the gift and started slowly.  But after eight meats she found her groove, and said, “That was just the appetizer! Now, for the salad bar.” She filled a plate to overflowing and polished off every bit — from her postwar days in Japan, she wastes not a grain of rice. Then she finished with four more meats.

 

 

Cynthia and I shared a hamburger. We got our money’s worth being amazed at Coco. And, I guess Coco now, like Mark Porter’s luncheon buddies, probably likes us more as well. Sweet.

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