SSA Part 3: Pick the winner before you set the contest
On Thursday, August 6th, the Six Corners Special Service Area (SSA) convened for the first time with the full slate of Alderman Gardiner’s hand-picked Commissioners. For a group of seven individuals who ostensibly had not met beforehand (which would be a violation of the Open Meetings Act), they managed to make unanimous decisions with absolutely no discussion. If you’ve ever participated in a Board, you understand how… unbelievable this is.
The agenda heading into the meeting included a single item of New Business: “Six Corners Chamber of Commerce as Sole Service Provider.” Many who have followed the SSA and Gardiner and Joe Angelastri’s machinations have known the plan over the past year was to take over the SSA, eliminate the Six Corners Association, and designate Joe’s Six Corners Chamber of Commerce as the new Sole Service Provider and manager of approximately $300,000 in taxpayer funds.
The presumption heading into this meeting by, well, almost everyone was that this new business would be introduced, some discussion would ensue, a process would be laid out to at least give the appearance of weighing the options, and then the Commissioners would select the Six Corners chamber in some future meeting. That is not at all what happened.
Mark Roschen, who works for the city Department of Planning and Development (DPD) and oversees the administration of the city’s SSA program city-wide, opened up the New Business segment. “In those rare cases, [where an SSA wants to switch service providers], we do strongly suggest a Request for Proposal process. That has always been the case and we want to make sure that is part of the process here.” adding, that the Six Corners Association is “one of our better performing service providers out there, so we are pleased with their ongoing performance.”
This recording with descriptive captions from the “New Business” segment of the meeting was posted to YouTube.
“Ask for a vote”
Roschen stated that the process must be “transparent, open, so that it’s not rushed with a chance to evaluate” options. He told Commissioners that he has distributed the Request for Proposal (RFP) template as a starting point and he’ll work with them to finalize the document and process to consider and select a service provider. Roschen ended up re-emphasizing with so much emotion and attention surrounding this issue, the best way forward was to take their time, be deliberate, and come up with a well-thought out decision.
In response to Roschen’s appeals for transparency, openness, and deliberation, Commissioner Mike Dimeo says, “Thanks Mark, I’d like to take the time now and I think it’s appropriate… I would like to make a motion to recommend Six Corners Chamber of Commerce as the 2021 Sole Service Provider.” Dimeo’s motion was immediately seconded by Commissioner Mary Giovenco Garcia. After a member of the public interjected that it was inappropriate to vote on new business without discussion and that this was “bullshit”. At this point an unidentified person seemingly in the room with Garcia whispers “ask for a vote”, which she does. Joanne Buckwalter was the only dissenting vote, however after subsequent comments from Dimeo, she interjected to change her vote making it unanimous.
“Is there a dual path for an RFP while we still have on record a unanimous vote [to select the winner of the RFP]?”
Did we mention that Dimeo resigned his position with the Six Corners Chamber of Commerce to be eligible to take on the SSA Commissioner role? That’s right. Dimeo helped found the organization that he wants to hand the service provider contract to without any debate, discussion, or pesky RFPs.
Asked to explain their decision by Amie Zander, the current Executive Director of the Six Corners Association, Dimeo says that area business owners should have a say in the priorities and how their tax levy is spent. Dimeo sites problems going back “eight or nine years”, which ironically includes many years when Joe Angelastri himself was an SSA Commissioner, saying he doesn’t care about events or programming and just wants to focus on maintenance and services. It’s understandable why the owner of a sewing store might care less about events than owners of restaurants and bars and why he wants a say in how this money is spent, however, as Zander points out in the meeting, the basic premise of his argument is flawed - it’s the SSA Commissioners who set the priorities and budget, not the Sole Service Provider. Dimeo is already in the position to set a zero dollar event budget if that’s what he wants and the Six Corners Association would have to execute on that.
If you listen to the audio, through all of Dimeo’s lecture on taxation and repeated references to “misunderstandings” by the community, recall that each of these business owners pays something on the order of $500 to $800 dollars per year for all of the services provided. Dimeo’s motion earlier in the meeting to cut the budget by 15% because of covid-19 will save him $85 in 2021.
None of the Commissioners have ever put forth a valid argument for why they want to switch service providers. Remember that this meeting is the very first meeting for three of these Commissioners. It’s implausible that any impartial, honest brokers could step into this setting and without a single word of discussion or debate, following DPDs guidance to issue an RFP, they could unanimously vote to ignore the process. It defies all reason and when things defy reason, it’s politics and/or corruption. Every one of these Commissioners was specifically put in their position to ensure that Angelastri’s Chamber gets the new contract and that’s what they did.
Despite the vote, Roschen stepped in to insist that they issue an RFP and comments again at how bad this looks to members of the public, many of whom were on this call. Dimeo then asks Roschen if they couldn’t follow a “dual path” where they put out an RFP while also accepting their vote to formally recommend to DPD that they award the 2021 service provider contract to the Six Corners Chamber. Go ahead and read that sentence again, it is as mindblowingly stupid as you think.
Roschen replies, “it’s kind of like picking the winner before you set the contest… we’re concerned about the optics of that.”
Given no real choice, the Commissioners agree to issue an RFP and go through the motions until they can pick their already determined winner. We highly recommend listening to the audio and the public comment portion of the meeting (16:30) where multiple residents are clearly awestruck at the open and shameless corruption they just witnessed.