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Our Fearless Leader, Mayor Will Sylvanagan
Take a few months off and look what happens!
It appears that "ANTOINE WALKERVILLE" has gone the way of all of Little Willy's promises and projects, we loose a Finance Director and gain a retired "good old boy" type who tried to wrangle a lifetime contract from his last employer , illegally, and are getting ready to place the collective Fall River municipal neck on the DOR guillotine, and much, much more.
Excuse me while I suppress this urge to laugh out loud and screech "I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!"......nope, can't do it...
I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!!!
Someone better get a grip in this City before REALLY bad stuff starts to happen. How can it get worse, you ask? OK, lets discuss this for a few moments.
First, the "Destination Casino" fiasco.....NO Bio-Park, no billion dollar casino, no jobs, no hope, no way! This is the centerpiece of the Sylvanagan administration. It showcases everything this hideous cast of characters responsible for making the idiot-boy as mayor are truly like. Greed, obnoxious power grabbing, incompetence, disrespect for the average Fall River citizen and a level of recklessness in the face of sworn fiduciary responsibility that , in any other municipality away from the South Coast, would result in being thrown out of office by public opinion, votes and, possibly, legal action.
A naked parade of stupidity and Chutzpah is what we have all witnessed. FROED, the RA, all the associated so-called "kingmakers" in what is quickly becoming a rather rancid and tawdry City all share total responsibility for the systematic failure on this project, of this administration, and this City. They have selected mayoral candidates, they have arranged political fortunes and have become involved in censorship in the only daily newspaper serving Fall River. They have wholly backed Sylvanagan in the hiring of unqualified administrative and financial "professionals" and have had only one thing in mind - maintaining control over City Hall, the City's budget and financial resources, regardless of source, and getting as much of it as possible through related businesses and personal relationships. They should all be ashamed. They have destroyed this City for personal gain. Their final aim is to see their puppet boy mayor gain higher political office. Fortunately, educated individuals and voters outside of the South Coast would laugh this collection of buffoonish morons and obsequious thieves back into their mother's wombs.
As long as the voters of Fall River allow the continuation of this sad charade by electing the candidates favored by the minions of FROED, the RA, and the powers that be things will continue to deteriorate to a point that even eventual state intervention will be too little, too late for most Fall River committed and bound property owners. These thieves are draining Fall River in the same manner the Mafia "busted out" the restaurant in the movie "GOODFELLA'S" This is not any kind of exaggeration. Think your property values and your related net worth are too low now? Just wait until the state steps in and takes over. But hey, you voted for Sylvanagan, not me.........
NEXT....Ah, yes, Mr. Grab. No one in the business knew who this guy was. How he became the City's Finance Director had to be more of an issue of someone desperate for a job than a "nationwide" search for qualified individuals. Trust me, not even in today's job market would a truly qualified professional leave one job willingly to take a pay cut, and never to take a job in a sadly run financial miasma like Fall River. The crapola about a shorter commute is just that, CRAPOLA.
What I suspect is that Mr. Grab, a municipal accountant by trade, must have either been asked to "go along" with some "creative entries" on required state reports to insure a tax rate would be approved by the state's DOR, or he started to become more familiar with the true reasons why Fall River has struggled so mightily to balance it's cash accounts from several past fiscal years , as well as reconcile some grant account activity from previous years at the School Department that are preventing Fall River from finishing past years audits.
So you, the reader, can understand the situation better, the DOR refusing to let Fall River to set a tax rate as a result of non compliance in filing required audit reports is as rare as hen's teeth - it's simply never done. In other words, the state is in the process of taking over the City's finances. In my opinion, one of the reasons the so called 'kingmakers" in Fall River are so desperate to control City Hall is because we all might find that many, many bad and illegal things have been done with City money, your tax dollars, over many previous years and administrations. To maintain control they must maintain control of those audits and the details of what OBJECTIVE auditors might find out about where the money went as opposed to where it was supposed to go. I believe it involves both , as Randy Moss would say, "straight cash, Homey" , as well as grant funds. All the reason you need to think that and probably be right is the one time existence of a video camera over the cash drawer "cash out" area in the Tax Collector's Office, no doubt made necessary by the outright theft of cash by City employees over time. What other conclusion could possibly be reached? Also, it would be a very interesting thing to see if auditors could actually find records detailing who was being paid out of various grant funds over several previous years not currently verified and included in completed audits. Grant requirements detail precisely what functions and positions may be covered by grant funds. One way to make audits impossible is to "misplace" required source documents detailing things like expenditure details and payroll reports. It would also not surprise me one bit to find City-side employees being paid out of School grant funds. Would that surprise YOU? I don't think so. Actually, the very fact that most people could expect such activity is both regrettable and self defining.
Also, Mr. Grab's part time , retired replacement, the ex-fiance director of Dartmouth, is a concern, and emblematic of the type of "go along-get along", malleable individuals this City demands right now. This guy was involved , along with most other finance department heads and the Town Administrator of Dartmouth in arranging an illegal "contract for life" with that town, as has been widely reported. The Town Administrator was fired over the entire affair, and it was widely accepted that there was a conspiracy, of sorts, with other department heads, to arrange these illegal contracts. This is the kind of man the City wishes to place in charge of the City's Treasurer's Office. This will fail gloriously as you would expect. Look for one of the current "puppet" employees within the current Treasure's Office staff, supported by a particular member of the FROED Board of Directors, to be the real controlling person in the office on a day-to-day basis. That's NOT a good thing at all. But, what else would you expect.
And then there was the DOR......
What can you say...no audits, no tax rate. You see, now that Deval Patrick has won his second, and according to him, last term as Governor, and in the face of a required billion dollar cut in the current fiscal years budget levels into FY 12, the state is in no mood to allow any municipality to refuse to comply with base level financial reporting requirements, not when the state funds over 65 cents out of every dollar spent in the Fall River municipal budget. Ain't gonna happen folks. The election year has come and gone and all the so-called "kingmakers" in Fall River have no juice on Beacon Hill when it comes to Fall River's financial officials and it's mayor not being able to count beans. What does this mean?
First, it means lots of expense, unbudgeted expense, to pay for the borrowing costs related to loans required to keep things happening in Fall River's government, like paying employees, plowing roads after snow storms, and keeping fire and police on the job. No tax rate means no tax bills which means yo have to borrow money from banks to pay for things. It is all so unnecessary yet so predictable.
Second, because this mayor made commitments a year ago to DOR to comply with all reporting requirement in a timely fashion, his entire administration no longer had any credibility with DOR and the Governor's administrative managers at Administration and Finance (A&F), the Secretariat which controls DOR. This, as you can imagine, is not a good thing. In fact, not only is locally produced tax revenue generation halted and more expense faced by the City because of it, the Secretary of A&F can also slow down the City's local aid and grant payments, also not such a great thing.
The bottom line in all of this is that Fall River's purposeful inability to complete audit reports for prior years will be the one thing that will cause the state to take over the City's finances. No one involved in making political decisions in this City is willing to lay bare for all the world to see the mistakes and missteps made by previous occupants in the Mayor's Office and at the School Department. It is all so gutless and predictable to the point of making an objective, right thinking person ill.
The schools you might ask, what of the schools? Apparently a graph has been handed out by administrators to teaching staff very recently that indicated that 80% of all the City's third graders failed the "open answer" portion of the MCAS test . "Open answer" means the child had to fill in the blank in a question or statement related to a story they just read, a statement like "When it rains the street becomes (blank)", with the child having to write in the appropriate answer mentioned in the story, like the word "wet", for instance. They failed even though they were allowed to re-read the story to find the correct answer! 80%! YIKES!!! This means , quite simply, that 80% of Fall River students cannot read! This means, quite simply that the Fall River School System has completely failed, even gotten worse, since Meg Mayo Brown has been School Superintendent, and state takeover of this failing school system is more than likely, it is probable at this point. Score another failure for Mayor Sylvanagan and his merry band of puppet string pullers. Total failure all the time.
No jobs, no schools, no money, no hope is what Mayor Sylvanagan has delivered to the voters of Fall River.
What a sad joke!
