Yeah, this is brilliant. There are seemingly two options of what's happening: 1) Whatever Cate did (or, is thought to have done) is actually quite a bit more serious than they're letting on, or 2) the city really, really is doing everything they can to look remarkably inept and Kiss is passing out shovels for a "this way to my political career burial party."

If someone is stealing money, they get fired. And quickly. But we see there's some hint of union-involved reorganization push behind this. That generally involves managers and sometimes elected folks. Soooo, maybe something small turned into something big: someone scratched off the thin layer of Krylon and found something more serious.

Then again, maybe we're just witnessing the general incompetence of a small town bureaucracy...

 

That comment is pretty interesting.

I have a very serious question:
How the hell did you wade through the muck in the BFP comments to find it?

Nice Job.

 

or could it be that a public investigation goes all through the entire administration? Personally, this is not at all what I expected from a Kiss admin.

This is far from incompetence, its a full blown cover-up, and I think its closed to the public because it will implicate far more than Cate himself.

 

Yeah, "Sabin" seems to have some inside info, eh? Cuz he's certainly not pulling that out of the articles from the BFP. Yeah, I think we're in general agreement: we gotta think this is something more serious than accusations of embezzlement. Oh, and if it turns out to be something simple and stupid, y'all should be DEMANDING your tax money back.

 

How are we gonna get it back? Sue Adam Cate?

 

could be something as simple as taking money from boaters for favors such as slip placements, no?

 

could be something as simple as taking money from boaters for favors such as slip placements, no?

I suppose it could. But if that were the case then it's a systems issue. The system should be altered to prevent the possibility of such corrupt actions. Like a slip placement log book that requires more than one signature per transaction, for example. Something like that.

It's silly to expect corrupt deeds won't happen if they are easy to do and hard to detect. Systems need to ensure that they are hard to do and easy to detect.

Also, if it were something like that, the city needs the testimony of a witness as a basis for action against Cate. Then they could fire Cate. Without that, they just have suspicion, which should only serve as the impetus for fixing the systems as I mentioned.

Hiring a PI on the taxpayer's dime is ridiculous. I would hope Cate asks for an open hearing before the Parks and Rec commission. Or somebody forces it to be public somehow.

 

As someone who spent their college years working on the waterfront, I can tell you that there are plenty of opportunities to collect revenues, yet there is very little accountability for A/R. Hourly dockage-fees can represent a huge chunk of revenues, and rates/fees are often left to negotiation. Nightly dockage can be subject to negotiation as well (arrival/departure times involved). Guess who "negotiates" -- very easy to see how monies could have been skimmed with little/no way to prove it.

That this looks like garden-variety embezzlement blown out of proportion should tell you something.

Frankly, you start to solve this problem by incentivizing P&L -- a public entity has very little incentive for accountability of revenues it collects.

 

Hourly dockage-fees can represent a huge chunk of revenues, and rates/fees are often left to negotiation. Nightly dockage can be subject to negotiation as well (arrival/departure times involved). Guess who "negotiates" -- very easy to see how monies could have been skimmed with little/no way to prove it.

Yeah. That sounds like a problem. Fees should be static and accounted for. It would be smarter to focus on the environment that fosters bad behavior over the behavior itself.

Giving Cate a four month paid vacation and hiring a PI is just throwing good money after bad without addressing the root cause of the problem.

 

Why doesn't BPD subcontract the docking fees to a private firm for a cut? A guarantee that a private firm wouldn't "negotiate" docking fees, and would have a hell of a lot more accountability for making and documenting a profit margin.

At a time when the city is trying to spend Millions for the Moran (moron) plant project, it seems that their own accounting practices are less than sound. Also, if its happening at the waterfront, whose to say it inst happening in other areas of cash revenue.

 

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