Ballard To Announce Fire House Plan He Hatched In Secret With Pay-To-Play Contractors

You learned exclusively on this blog that Mayor Greg Ballard had hatched a secret deal with his pay-to-play contractor friends who bankroll his campaign committee, pay for his overseas junkets and lavish gifts, and free meals and country club memberships on him to locate the city's largest fire station from its current location on Mass Ave to the heart of the Lockerbie neighborhood to make room for new development along the booming Mass Ave. Tomorrow, Mayor Ballard will officially announce his plan, one that has already met with a resounding, unanimous vote of the Lockerbie People's Club in opposition to the proposed new site at College and Michigan Streets to make room for the development of the current fire station site. Ballard will be joined at tomorrow's press announcement by David Andrichik, head of the Mass Ave Merchants Association and Cassie Stockamp, President of the Athenaeum Foundation, neither of whom reside in our neighborhood, but both of whom stand to benefit financially from a massive investment of public funds in private development at a time when the City lacks resources to provide adequate public safety services for the City's residents. Ballard, his council friends who pushed the TIF expansion plan through the council and the pay-to-play contractors have all known for months that the new fire station would be relocated to Lockerbie, but they deliberately withheld that information from residents, leading them to believe that a project other than what was planned would occur on a vacant parcel in their neighborhood. Councilor Vop Osili, who represents the Lockerbie neighborhood and who sponsored the downtown TIF expansion ordinance that makes possible the latest publicly-financed private development efforts, has essentially told his constituents who are unhappy with the proposed new location for Fire Station #7 to drop dead. Osili claims the parcel on which the proposed fire station is to be built is on the side of the street represented by Councilor Joe Simpson, and that he has nothing to say about the proposed new site. By the way, since the media won't tell you this when tomorrow's announcement is made, the Ballard administration rejected competing development plans for the fire station site that did not require an investment of your public tax dollars. That's just how much of an enemy of the taxpayers this corrupt man has become.

UPDATE: The pay-to-play winners are developer Paul Kite, Schmidt Associates and J.C. Hart according to the IBJ's Cory Schouten. I hope he does his job and digs in a lot deeper than this initial article reveals. Yes, you are going to pay to build another parking garage that will only benefit the contractors and developers who are filling up Ballard's campaign pockets with cash.