APS' money pit?

When the purchase of the twins was first contemplated, there were those who argued it was an unjustifiable extravagance and would become a money pit. Promises to rent out one of the buildings to cover the expenses of the other weren't kept. The purchase prompted a stampede of administrators looking to get out of schools and into more comfortable digs.

Those arguments were heard and ignored long before the real spending began; long before the building was brought up to standards more befitting APS senior administrators and school board members. And long before the budget overruns began piling up.

The folks who paid the bills for the building and accoutrements will likely never know just how much they paid. They will never be told how much money they spent on an administrative complex with covered parking for bigwigs, instead of on the decrepit classrooms and portables their children were attending.

The simplest questions go unanswered; how much did we pay for the chairs board members sit in a few hours a month; did we really spend $800 a chair?

The clearest indicator that they have something to hide,
is that they are hiding something.

They are hiding a candid, forthright and honest accounting
of all of the public dollars invested in sprucing up the digs
at 6400 Uptown Blvd.

The proof that they are hiding the record is the absence of the record. If they're not hiding it, where is it?

And why else would there not be a record of the spending
except that the record wasn't ever made, or made and lost,
or destroyed, or is being hidden?

As unsettling as that prospect is, there is a bigger issue than
the amount of money they spent at 6400 Uptown Blvd, and that
is the amount of money they've spent and are willing to spend in
the future, continuing to cover up how much they spent.

That and the ongoing aid and abet provided for them by the
establishment media; Kent Walz and the Journal, and the
NM Broadcasters Association affiliates who refuse to investigate
and report upon unjustifiable extravagance in the spending of
scarce educational resources on administrative spaces instead
of in classrooms.




photo Mark Bralley