Remember the deal that the City had with the developer on the Durrell School site and how it fell apart?  Well it came to our attention that there were two developers.  Well the developer that got awarded the deal by the city had another developer with the same money.  So the city decided to rewrite the proposal and that’s when the developer was informed about the possible 21E problem and he backed out.  Now the deal is back out there with a provision that there is only a 30 day period to close after the bid is accepted.  We were wondering how any developer would be able to close 30 days after an accepted bid with a 21E problem – of course unless there’s already another developer waiting in the wings with the inside track.

We recently received a copy of an interesting email that came from a City Department Head that was sent on February 11th  –  the same person who had problems with a certain boat recently.   The email was sent to “Everyone” with the subject as “Car for Sale” the body of the email read “1986 Chevy El Camino.  Great shape, 57,000 original miles, runs excellent, brand new transmission, Florida car, collectors item.”  We also heard that the emailer was told by the Mayor’s Office that it wasn’t a good idea to have it done on the City email list.  The same person told us to check MGL 268A.  We wonder if there was a fine given to the emailer, we hope to find out.  We wouldn’t have normally believed this story, but we came into an actual copy of the email.

We were told that there are some ethics seminars starting this week and that city employees have been encouraged to go.  We would like to echo this encouragement and hope that some Department Heads take the seminar at least twice, maybe three times until it sinks in, or until the Feds show up.  Oh wait, they’ve already been here, or have they even left?

Another interesting political fund-raiser story recently had certain city employees walking around most of the evening with name tags saying they were someone else.  When it got relayed back to the us here at Newstalk we thought it was funny and at least worth mentioning, even though some of us are puzzled as to the meaning.