Ballard Administration Fails To Comply With ROC Subpoena

The Ballard administration's conspiracy to cover up multiple possible criminal law violations committed to defraud Indianapolis taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars in order to reward a campaign contributor continues unabated. Fox59 News' Russ McQuaid reports that the administration ignored a deadline to respond to a subpoena issued on March 10, 2014 by the ROC Investigating Committee to produce dozens of documents the committee has sought from the administration for more than four months. A few outstanding document requests trickled in to the council's attorney's office after the deadline passed but many others were not produced. According to news reports, former Public Safety Director Frank Straub ordered many documents related to the controversial 25-year, $20 million lease for the regional operations center shredded after his forced resignation but before he left his job to become the new police chief for the Spokane, Washington police department. The committee may have to go to court to force the administration to comply with the subpoena. Here's more from McQuaid's report tonight:

“What we got today is unacceptable and most of it was on the documents request since November,” said Councilman Joe Simpson. “You heard the same story from the word, ‘Go!’ ‘We don’t have them. We don’t know where they are. It’s not my job.’ My job is for you to tell me if you don’t have them, then, why? Where are they?”

Hours after the committee’s deadline, passed over republican objections, passed, Simpson said partial documents began trickling into the council’s attorney from the city’s lawyers.

“There were about ten documents that had no documents attached to it. Some we’re not able to find and four of them, there were no documents period.” . . .

Meanwhile, Indianapolis taxpayers continue to shell out nearly $60,000 a month in rent for a building it cannot occupy while it awaits a punch list of more than 100 repair items the City never bothered getting around to identifying until months after it abandoned the building because of its unsafe conditions and only after it entered into a settlement agreement late last year which left the City without any legal remedy, and which ratified the terms of the long-term, credit tenant financing lease agreement that Straub executed without proper authority in 2011 in a rush to get the ROC operating prior to the Super Bowl in 2012. In any other city in America people would be going to jail for all the fraud perpetrated on the public in this deal, but this is Indianapolis where it's an acceptable practice to defraud taxpayers any way you can in order to reward campaign contributors.

Unnerved by their pathetic handling of the regional operations center, the Ballard administration is pushing forward with its first public hearing tonight to privatize Marion County's criminal justice system. The plan calls for moving the county's jail, sheriff's department, criminal courts, prosecutors, public defenders and other related criminal justice agencies out of their current downtown locations into a new, single facility. The administration wants to award a long-term, credit lease financing agreement to a private vendor to build, operate and maintain a new criminal justice center at a single location, a plan that will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars more in the long-run than if the City financed, owned and operated its own facility. The administration's consultant originally picked a site near the county line on the far west side next to the airport as the preferred location. After being bombarded with public criticism, the Ballard administration switched course and announced that its new preferred site is the former GM stamping plant site just west of the downtown across from the zoo on West Washington Street. This has nothing to do with what is best for the taxpaying public; it's all about doing what will provide the biggest financial reward to the campaign contributors stuffing money in the politicians' pockets.