Scandals of Holyoke

I am so overdue for posting! And things are happening!

Work story back-story: Everyone who's done community development in Holyoke has known that the City's Office of Community Development (OCD), which distributes federal funds to local community development and affordable housing projects, is useless and incompetent at best, malignant and corrupt at worst. But, despite many people's best efforts, no one has been able to prove their wrongdoing on paper. Until now... (cue threatening music). We recently found that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) did two audits of the OCD last year, and documented all kinds of malpractice. At first it just looks like major misappropriation of federal funds, but the deeper you look, the shadier it gets. Millions of dollars are missing. Houses definitely aren't being built. Competing agencies (ones that actually build affordable houses) have been put out of business. And individuals are pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest on loans that have been sitting in bank accounts for years. And this has been going on for 30 some-odd years. So my organization has been leading the charge against it! We are making sure that City Hall won't sweep it all under the rug, so we're feeding information to City Councilors and the press. We've met with federal officials. There's a possibility that my bosses will eventually be subpoenaed as witnesses. We're working hard to develop a strategy and might try to organize a city-wide campaign. (One of my bosses wants to get a huge group of people together and storm into the OCD office, but I don't think that's going to happen.) It's all very exciting. Hopefully in the end, the City will have lots more money to do affordable housing projects, some of that money will go to us, the Director of the OCD will be fired, the OCD will be completely reformed, and the corrupt agency that's been receiving all the federal funds will be disbarred. And at the very best, people will be charged with criminal offenses and thrown in prison.

All this has gotten me super interested in corruption as an obstacle to economic and community development. We talk about government corruption in developing countries ALL the time, but what about here? The irony was that we discovered the federal audits the week after the earthquake in Haiti. At the time all these pundits were blaming public corruption in Haiti for enabling the disaster, which is probably true. But all I could think about was that it happens pretty easily here too. The same kind of scandal has taken place recently in Chicopee, Springfield, and probably every city in New Jersey.

The worst of it, too, is not even that some rich white guy has gotten richer off of taxpayers' money. The worst of it is how much opportunity for public services and affordable housing has been lost in the city. 30 years' worth! I get really riled up when I think how much good that money could have done if spent differently.

Whew, so that's that. Exciting! If they ever make an Erin Brockovich-type movie out of this, Anne Hathaway can play my part (or that MySpace celebrity whose picture Selena had on her door).