It's not sitting well with us, members of the School Board.

Letters, documents, and articles are coming my way at a fast pace this morning.  (Not complaining, keep 'em coming!!!) They support Dirk Taylor's letter to the School Board. Maybe it is too much to put in one post, but I thought I would do it anyway.  They are not listed in any particular order.  I don't want to bury Dirk's letter, so make sure you read it!

From Steve Diaz:
Members of the Board:  Given your new decision to break up your project so that you hire multiple prime contractors, can you explain how you justify the redundant administrative and overhead costs, the added delays and costs of likely jurisdictional disputes, and other unnecessary cost-overruns that are invariably associated with such an approach?  What benefit do you see in doing this?  You have gone from tone-deaf to the legitimate concerns of the community to a place that has no connection to reason or common sense.  It is time to look forward to the high likelihood of continued frustration and failure as you mire yourselves down in one ill-conceived step after another:  It is time for a breather -- you should take at least 6 months to study the options and consider how your plan can be made more efficient (not less so) while taking immediate steps to minimize the financial damage that your premature issuance of bonds has caused.  The clock may be running on a process you have played with and mismanaged for years, but simply doing "something" is no guarantee of success.  In fact, it would be good to do what most decision makers would do in a situation such as the one in which you now find yourselves:  go back over what has gone wrong so far, change the team that has been unable to pull it together (including your own membership and committees, not just pointing fingers at third parties), and consider what merit there may be in the advice and opinion you have consistently rejected out of hand.  If you are even now not willing to admit that your building project has been mishandled right along, you underscore your own ineffectiveness.  There is no reason for the public to have any confidence in you or your process.  If you cannot change course, then you must resign in recognition of the totally failed leadership you have offered this community.  This is the third time I have called on you (yes, all of you) to resign for malfeasance, and I will continue to do so if you cannot find a way not to continue doing that which has led to unmitigated failure to date.  You know what they say about people who continue doing the same ineffective thing over and over again expecting a different result.  Look in the mirror, look to the paltry number of "supporters" for your project and ask yourselves "why have so many interested and concerned citizens simply given up on the school board".  There is a reason people are walking away:  no one believes that you listen or respond to anything but your own voice.  You cannot believe you are admired or successful stewards of this community's affairs.

In the meantime, I have to ask, again, why you do not answer the questions I have posed about Federal arbitrage penalties the school board may face on the bonds you issued almost 2 years ago, how you can justify borrowing so much money when you did, and what you plan to do now about the cash- and debt-management fiasco in your building program.  Just a reminder: you also refuse to say how you will pay for the pension funding obligation given the fact that no "bailout" is on the horizon.  Does such conduct strike any of you as responsible or worthy of public confidence?  You must recognize your own failures and take personal responsibility for them.

With Due Respect.  

Steve Diaz

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Here is the application waiver that Baldwin-Whitehall submitted to the PDE for their auditorium renovation after using multiple-prime contracts for their high school. Baldwin-Whitehall waiver See the PG article here.
Update: Letters from the Baldwin-Whitehall architect have been added here and here. 

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The Petersen Event Center was a public school multiple prime contractor project partly managed by P.J. Dick.  You cannot make this stuff up.  Read the PA Separations Act Report and Post Gazette articles.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04102/299310.stm
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04103/299740.stm
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07121/782379-85.stm
http://www.postgazette.com/pg/05001/435755-85.stm