Fink's Legacy: Another Secret Township Board Meeting

Editorial by Jim Nelson

undernewmanagement 340w

What will they be talking about in April 25th's closed session?  Probably about the rumored $20,000 cost of each of the still unobtained easements for the Barker Road non motorized path.  

In his haste to inflate his resume with our tax dollars, the dear departed patron saint of free money, Township Manager Howard Fink, neglected to obtain the required easements from the property owners while the Township had a tenable negotiating position.  Trustees supposedly watching your back, including Jacki Otto and Janet Chick, sat by and allowed Fink to do it.  Wayne Dockett was the only Trustee on the former Board to object to what was either Fink's ineptitude or flagrantly misleading cost accounting.

The kicker is that the previous Board promised to the property owners who had already sold their easements (for fair prices), to match the prices that the Township would finally pay for the unsettled easements.  In other words, the moment the Township pays $20,000 per new easement, they have promised to retroactively raise the price paid for those already bought.  Sounds fair, if gruesomely expensive.  Yet at a Board meeting earlier this year, Trustee Otto astonished everyone by saying that the promise made by the previous board was "optional."  In other words, the word of the Township Board and its Trustees could be considered to mean absolutely nothing.

That's something you should remember.    I'll post a LiveVideo link to that later. 

 

Meeting Documents:

We have broken the packet into component documents, converted as necessary to searchable text.  As a bonus, in addition to making everything ridiculously easier to find, it saves you money.  Those people on limited internet plans or speeds save about 33%.