[click to enlarge and read] The IP does not even have a candidate filed yet for the two down-ticket Constitutional offices.
For such a do nothing party, it seems only appropriate that they'd have someone for the do nothing office of state auditor.
I don't know what the auditor does, if anything, and went to the official website and still can see little that a single CPA could not accomplish, without staff.
So, you tell me. Rebecca Otto seems to be a nice person. Pat Anderson [Awada] wants the job back. So what?
I tried, once Otto had won, to get that office interested into auditing the Ramsey Town Center financing and money situation, at about the time Nedegaard's thing blew up. Awada had ignored the situation, but this was new blood, this was DFL and not business as usual. Right? It was immediately after the 2006 election that I made the effort, and since it was late November 2006 only months after election day that Nedegaard was sued by the lending bank consortium to force a bankruptcy, it seemed timely to me. It seemed that an official "auditor" should look at the conflict of interest problems that I viewed as systemic to the thing then, indeed from its outset, and yet some fairly senior person on Otto's staff emailed back, basically saying, "We do not do that. If we did there'd be soooooooooooo much to do and we do not have the staff for it."
If not those exact words, the functional equivalent.
The County Attorney already had largely turned a blind eye, form a seat on the Ramsey Planning Commission, and the City Attorney largely did the same, except Terry Hendriksen was then on council and wanted and requested a legal opinion on conflict of interest. Instead of getting a legitimate AGO, something different was attained, saying it appeared to have been kind of okay to that point but there might be problems in the future.
A non-opinion opinion, one that many disliked, and some disliked the fact that a particular firm all too often got tapped in such situations, etc.
But if there was no audit of that situation, crying for one, what did get audited by the State Auditor?
How sister city trips to China were being processed by Ramsey got a bit of State Auditor attention, because the then-mayor wanted to be proper in his junket, and requested an opinion.
That was during the Anderson [Awada] period, as best as I recall. I recall a response as if Awada was replying some of my friends think this, some think that, and I agree with my friends; enjoy China, Tom. One good old person to another.
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So, Town Center was slipping into litigation, and foreclosures, the bankers in North Branch were pursued over things where three ultimately copped pleas to criminal charges, the land speculators walked off with the lion's share of money from the table, one on council one on the Charter Commission, and Nedegaard was forced into a bankruptcy and died, and the State Auditor was too busy to notice or care.
Not on my plate, not on my table.
What then DOES the office do besides rubber stamp stuff?
What gets audited and for what reason, and how thoroughly?
It seems ---