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Public Corruption in Chester County, PA

I believe an unlikely mix of alleged drug trafficking related politicos and alleged white nationalist related politicos united to elect the infamous “Bloc of Four” in the abysmal voter turnout election of 2005. During their four year term the drug business was good again and white nationalists used Coatesville as an example on white supremacist websites like “Stormfront”. Strong community organization and support from law enforcement, in particular Chester County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll has begun to turn our community around. The Chester County drug trafficking that I believe centers on Coatesville continues and I believe we still have public officials in place that profit from the drug sales. But the people here are amazing and continue to work against the odds to make Coatesville a good place to live.

Friday, April 2, 2010

“One thing that we are all learning here is; it’s a mess.”- Ed Simpson

This is an excerpt transcribed from the City of Coatesville Budget Workshop meeting of Monday, March 29, 2010. Please notify me if there are any mistakes in my transcription. Jim Pitcherella

Coatesville City Councilperson Marty Eggleston, “But if I may, Mr. Reed kind of reach back and re-suggest what I suggested earlier this evening… a day or two of in-service and we put together specific tasks with specific time frames and deadlines for specific departments.”

Coatesville City Council President Ed Simpson, “You’re saying to shut our Codes Department down for a day or two and say, ‘we’re working on this.”

Marty Eggleston, “Codes Department, Finance Department, whatever department needs to be caught up and let’s close shop for two days and play catch up…

If you’re telling me well, we don’t have information from 6 months ago. I’m reasonably OK with that because we’re talking about 6 months. We’re talking about 3 years, that’s crazy."

Coatesville Director of Finance Ms. Stacy Bjorhus, "Raj can pull up information…check numbers for 06, 07 because we have right to know, a broad amount of years…we could use the check numbers to look up things…we do have it."

Stacy Bjorhus, “Some of the information is on paper, generated on paper. We have that. So it’s not that we don’t have any.”

Ed Simpson, “One thing that we are all learning here is, it’s a mess.”

Coatesville City Manager Ted Reeves, “This is what we have been dealing with since I’ve been here…That’s why the budget concerns me the way it is now, without me knowing the countdown in side of 09, for January 1 of 09 so that we have… an accurate countdown for January 1 of 10. We don’t know. We’re getting close to the information.” Raj has been working on getting those up to date. Stacy has been working on other things matching checks and matching deposits and all that stuff and I think the whole department.. has been working very hard… I think Stacy’s has someone working part time to try to get the information together. It’s a laborious slow process.

The auditors will be coming hopefully in a couple of weeks. They said that they could have 08 and 09 almost done by the end of September, if they can get in by the 1st of May. That’s really pushing to get it done that quickly. But at least we’ll have the information in the audit. But hopefully they can give us some information as we go along. Certainly looking at the budget for 10 we’re going to have to make a lot of assumptions just from the information that we’ve got already. But that’s the only thing we can do right now… April 12 is the next meeting, I’m suggesting April 14 which on a Wednesday."

Karl Marking, “At some point in time blind spots …or not we have to draw a line in the sand… We can’t wait until September of course to get reconciliation to make the 2010 budget 75% of the way through the year… If we are all on the same page we all are going to bring things to the table. Are we saying that April 14 is going to be the date that we’re going to have the data that we need to deliberate against to make decisions about?"

Ted Reed, “All I can say is that we’ll have as much data on the budget as we possibly can that we feel comfortable that is fairly accurate. It’s not going to be accurate until we have the 08 and 09 audits done. But this will give us time to lock ourselves in a room, as Mr. Eggleston said. Ms. Bjorhus and I need to sit down and go over line item by line item and then do the same thing with each of the department heads and go over it there, to make sure that what they have in there is the right way to go."

City of Coatesville’s present Operating Budget for 2010 from Karl Marking’s blog:

http://www.karlmarking.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/working-budget-for-032910-mtg.pdf

Listen to the excerpt from the Budget Workshop here:

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