The clamor for a finance director from the people of Norwalk, the Common Council, and the Mayor is apparently causing Greg Burnett and Sal Corda to circle the wagons around Stuart Opdahl. They dumped a sheaf of finance job descriptions on the table at last night’s meeting challenging Bruce Kimmel and Jack Chiaramonte to find anything that Norwalk’s Opdahl isn’t doing. Kimmel and Chiaramonte were not amused.
Heated words were exchanged, and the end result was that it seems with this year’s budget seemingly in hand, Corda has no interest in fixing the state of finance. In fact, he had the audacity to ask the budget committee to approve a $1 million transfer to cover a 33% soft cost over run to Gilbride Gilbane, the project/construction management firm rennovating the schools. Notably, there was no detail of what those costs entailed.
Think about it. Here’s a budget committee being asked to rubber stamp a cost that has not been vetted by anyone other than Opdahl. Apparently the Price Waterhouse report that specifically cautioned in the lack of construction and project management experience that Opdahl had would cause problems. Problems that are only readily apparent now.
The BOE has run through hundreds of millions of dollars on operational costs that runs through Opdahl’s fingers. Corda and Burnett were quick to deride the Price Waterhouse report, and did not want a new forensic auditor hired.
Looks like Corda, Burnett, and Opdahl have plenty to hide here. Why isn’t Susan Hamilton, current chair of the BOE, concerned about this? Why aren’t the people who say they care about educational dollars makingit into the classroom demanding that every dollar is maximized for education, and not for unchecked cost overruns?
Here’s the reality, Cord has no problem asking for millions from the taxpayer when it comes to anything but a finance director. He has no problems with replacing the same textbooks every 4 years, with first class travel to conferences, with laptops in the classroom, with vice principals and other administrative hires in elementary schools. Whether any of this benefits students or not is not the question here. He has shown no restraint in asking the taxpayer for money for these things. But when the taxpayer asks for a finance director, he balks. He not only balks, but smirks his way through meetings without even providing detailed finance reports on current spending.
Yeah Norwalk has a huge crime problem, but it’s not on the streets it’s on the third floor of City Hall.
