The Fort Worth Weekly has the story about the EDC fiasco and the secretive dealings that cost taxpayers money. YOU can't afford to miss it.
WHO was asking about the EDC prior to the audit? Bob Watkins, write-in candidate for Mayor. What does that tell you? VOTE.
That full accounting may be a long time coming. Of the four people who constituted the EDC board in 2004 when key arrangements regarding Flynn were changed, one is dead and one says he can’t remember most of what happened. A third member, who was then the board president, defended the Flynn deal — and she said she can’t remember who the fourth member was. City officials say they’re not sure exactly how many properties the EDC and Flynn bought for the city.
“That’s just unbelievable,” Carlton Schwab, president and CEO of the Texas Economic Development Council, said. “EDCs are supposed to be all about helping create jobs. “Where is the job creation? … Where is the economic development?”
Another key question: Where are the records and the public accountability for the EDC, which is funded with a half-cent hike in the sales tax, approved by Haltom City voters in two stages? And how was so much of what was done allowed to happen in secrecy?
Current council member Gary Nunn said he’s been asking for that kind of information for two years and has never gotten any answers.
With Flynn as director and new Mayor Calvin White as board president, Haltom City EDC business moved almost exclusively behind closed doors, in executive sessions.
“We had an interim city manager named Pat Efrink,” said Harper, “and one day at a meeting he simply told me I was no longer allowed at the meetings. Neither was anyone else. Which meant no one knew what was going on with the EDC.”
But in January 2008, when the EDC took on Chesapeake Energy in a condemnation case over land the EDC wanted for a ball field, the EDC lost. Ironically, Chesapeake, which through its Texas Midstream pipeline company routinely condemns land, responded with a public relations blitz, asking Haltom City residents if they knew what an EDC was, why a consultant for the EDC was preventing those citizens from having their mineral rights developed, and touting the millions of dollars that would come to Haltom City if the EDC would allow them to develop land and mineral leases they already owned. The campaign worked. The EDC backed off.
Told that the Haltom City EDC currently owns 40 undeveloped properties, Schwab said he’d never heard of that happening either.
The real issue, he said, is that for all the land transactions and all the money paid to Flynn, there has been little business development produced.
