The Local Area Watch

WHAT A LIE COSTS ...

... According to Judge Enslen $1.6 million.

Yesterday Judge Richard Enslen of the U.S. District Court ordered former Metropolitan Health vice president Mary Scott to pay her ex-employer $1.6 million for lying to the court.  You may recall that Scott had brought a false claim lawsuit against Metropolitan hospital.  She alleged that it had filed false statements with the federal government to obtain fraudulent health care reimbursements from the taxpayers.  The hospital settled the suit two years ago by agreeing to return $6.25 million of those reimbursements.  Scott then received a bounty of $1.1 million from the federal government.

Now it was Scott's turn to be tagged as a fraud.  She filed a wrongful discharge lawsuit in Enslen's court claiming that Metropolitan had fired her for blowing the whistle on the hospital's fraud.  However, the court ruled that the basis of her lawsuit were false affidavits.  Furthermore, she knowingly concealed evidence detrimental to her wrongful discharge claim.  So Judge Enslen socked her with $1.6 million in sanctions payable to Metropolitan to cover its attorney fees in defense against her fraudulent lawsuit.

The Local Area Watch is pleased to see at least one judge in the Western Michigan district is willing to penalize fraudsters who pollute the judicial process with their lies.

MUSEUM DIRECTOR BOOTED

The Grand Rapids public museum has a new boss and a new future as an independent institution.  The taxpayer subsidy from the City of Grand Rapids will be phased out in three years, and the museum will be completely on its own for funding.  The city subsidy has already been declining over the past several years, so the museum already has experience in raising money from other sources.

Even so, the city is retiring Museum Director Timothy Chester at the ripe old age of 49 because of the City Commission's disappointment with his financial management of the institution.  Chester will be giving up a salary of over ninety grand a year, but collecting his fifty thousand dollar annual pension should buoy his spirits.  (Who knew failure could be so rewarding?  Oh right.  Government work.)  To lead the transition, the city has given Thomas Wesholski, a banker, a $50,000 contract to re-organize the museum as a non-profit corporation and put it on its path of independence.

All in all, this is a sensible move.  I just wonder where the Van Andels are?  After all, the museum is supposed to called the Van Andel Museum after their dear ol' departed dad.  They claim to be sitting atop of their half of the mult-billion-dollar Amway fortune.  Paying the museum's bills would be chump change for them -- only a sliver of just the interest throw off from such a huge pile of wealth.  But just like the Van Andel Institute, they want the status of high-profile good works, but want someone else to pay for them.

There are only one of two explanations for their tight-fistedness.  Either the Van Andels are misers, or the fortune doesn't exists.  Whichever it is, they aren't being square with us when they pass the hat for the institutions named for their father.

GUTLESS U-M CAVES ON BRONZES

For nearly sixty years the bronze sculptures of "Dream of the Young Man" and "Dream of the Young Girl" graced the entrance of the Literature, Science, and the Arts Building at the center of the University of Michigan campus.  They were the work of Marshall Fredericks who also produced the famous two-story high "Spirit of Detroit" sculpture in downtown Detroit.

However, the bronzes offend the pieties of the modern college campus, which today resembles something closer to a police state than a sanctuary for free thinking.  The sculptures have vexed campus feminists for some time now, and the pusillanimous U-M President Mary Sue Coleman has caved in to them.  The sin of Fredericks's work:  The male figure dreams of a ship at sea while the female figure dreams of taming the wilderness as a pioneer mother.  You'd think Coleman gets paid enough (she is the highest paid state official at three-quarters of million dollars a year) to tell the P.C. police to take a hike, but I guess not.

But give the gutless wonder some credit.  Coleman could've gone Taliban on the bronzes and blasted them to smithereens like the Islamists did to the Buddha figures carved into an Afghan mountainside.  Instead she had the dreamers carted off to a remote corner of the campus.  So art endures, if obscured, in her grotty little fiefdom of intellectual poseurs and petty inquisitions.

TEACHERS UNION DEFEATED

On Wednesday the Ingham County Circuit Court in Lansing booted a lawsuit brought by the Michigan Education Association, the union for public school teachers.  The MEA tried to get the court to shut down thirty-two charter schools operated by Bay Mills Community College, an Indian institution located in the U.P.  One of Bay Mills charter schools is Vista Charter Academy in Wyoming.

The MEA wanted the court to cut off state funding to all the schools chartered by Bay Mills that were not sited on the Indian reservation in Brimley.  Apparently the MEA thought that the Indian college should not have the same right as all other public universities in the state to charter a school anywhere in Michigan.  Fortunately, the court in Lansing put a stop to this nasty piece of business by the MEA.

The lesson from this is that the education of your children is not a priority for the teachers union.  The MEA will do whatever it takes to protect its monopoly on the public school teaching contracts in this state.  The union knows that monopoly is threatened by charter schools, so it files lawsuits like the one against Bay Mills to crush that competition -- even if it means arguing that Indians don't have the same rights as everyone else in Michigan.

When it comes to defending their turf and all the tax dollars attached to it, the teachers union will get as ugly as it needs -- and the kids and common decency be damned.

CALEDONIA'S CREDIT CARD CROOK

Last night the board of Calendonia's public school district suspended with pay Superintendent Wes VanDenburg.  VanDenburg is accused of embezzling from the school district sixteen thousand dollars over the past year by charging personal expenses to the district's credit card and billing for fraudulent reimbursements.

The suspected embezzlements were mostly nickel-and-dime stuff, like tanking up the family car or getting a couple of sandwiches at the Subway.  One has to wonder what drives a man the public is paying $170,000 a year to run a small suburban school district and only a year away from collecting a cushy pension to steal sixteen grand.  VanDenburg claims he was only being "generous" by buying meals for others.  Of course, the amount or the motivation aren't the issue.  VanDenburg violated a public trust.  He had no business being generous with the money the taxpayers entrusted him with.  He had a duty to spend that money as carefully as possible to educate the district's students.

However, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude from the evidence that VanDenburg is guilty of something more than sloppy bookkeeping of his generosity.  As illustrated on the front page of the Sunday Press, a receipt for $6.97 spent at a cafe doesn't turn into one for $36.97 without someone making a deliberate decision to put a "3" in front of the original amount.  The school board has a duty to the taxpayers and the residents of Caledonia to punish this wrongdoing, including criminal prosecution.

Well, it looks like the school board, after some hemming and hawing, is getting serious about dealing with VanDenburg.  Board President Dennis Atkinson certainly has been on point about VanDenburg's graft, despite significant opposition from some board members and the community.  Some of the most vociferous support for the disgraced VanDenburg has been from Board Treasurer Ken Yonker.  I find that interesting, because isn't it Yonker's job to be the watchdog of district funds?  His position is like that of a security guard arguing to go easy on the thief that broke in during his shift.  Plainly it is in Yonker's political interest to whitewash what happened instead of explaining how money was stolen from the public on his watch.

Voters in Caledonia might want to keep that in mind in the next school board election.

SHOW ME THE MONEY, DAVE

According to the Press, on Tuesday at Cornerstone University David Van Andel, Amway heir and chairman of the Van Andel Institute, lectured the attendees of the school's Executive Series Luncheon on the duty of businesses to give back to the community.  By that he meant businesses should help others, create economic independence for the impoverished, promote education, and alleviate the "pain and suffering" of individuals.

That last mission, Dave noted, just happens to be purpose of the Van Andel Institute.  So I suppose he would be OK with businesses fulfilling their philanthropic obligations by donating money and resources to his organization.  But why should anyone donate anythng to the Van Andel Institute?  Dave's late father Jay, who made his money with the Amway scam and then founded the institute, promised the people of Grand Rapids that most of his two-and-a-half-billion-dollar fortune would be committed to the continued operation of the Van Andel Institute.  That's more than enough money to keep the place, and Dave's sinecure in it, chugging along.

But it appears that Jay's kids haven't kept his promise.  Immediately after their father's death a year ago, they disbanded his foundation and stopped its funding of the Van Andel Institute, which totaled $30 million annually.  After that Dave and his siblings made vague statements to the public that the family would continue to support the institute financially.  But no specifics as to how much and from what source have been offered, and the Amway-smitten local media has not raised these questions let alone press them.  Instead they, especially the Grand Rapids Press, have acted like P.R. flacks hyping the bio-tech boom the Van Andel Institute will bring to River City only if the public gets its act together to support it.

So Dave can lecture on our duty to give back to the community, which conveniently includes the Van Andel Institute.  However, I say to Dave, "Show me the money!" his father promised to the institute.  Until then, no one should cough up a dime for the institute.

REPROBATE UPDATE

Upon further reading of the daily dispatches from Detroit regarding the FBI's seizure of records from the law offices of personal injury lawyer Geoffrey Feiger, it looks like the feds suspect Feiger's law firm of having strong-armed employees, and their wives and children, into making contributions to the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign last year.

Allegedly, one of Feiger's partners would instruct an employee to make a maximum campaign contribution of $2,000 in his name, his wife's name, and then in the names of each of their children.  The firm would then reimburse the employee for the contributions.  This would be an illegal way for an organization like Feiger's law firm to bundle campaign contributions and skirt the limits on the amount an individual can donate to a candidate for federal office.

If that happened, it's pretty sleazy.  Even if Feiger can make the case that he didn't know his partner was illegally bundling contributions, that doesn't speak well of his ability to manage a clean office.  I think that would be a minimum qualification for the state's top cop job which Feiger wants.

That said, I think the laws limiting how much you or I or Feiger can contribute to a political campaign should be abolished.  So long as all contributions are publicly disclosed and in the form a check or money order, what does it matter how much a person gives a candidate?  The crooked politicians would still be crooks and the honest ones would still be honest and, as always, it's up to the voters to decide the matter regardless of how much money flows through a campaign.

Plus, it's a canard that there's too much money going into U.S. election campaigns.  We actually spend very little on them compared to other types of publicity and advertising in this country.  All that capping contributions does is make it a lot harder for an outsider to get his message out to voters, because it is much more difficult for him than the established politician with all his connections and mailing lists to raise money in the form of thousands of small contributions.

Nevertheless, coercing employees in order to circumvent a lousy law is still reprehensible, and if Feiger had anything to do with the illegal bundling to support the Kerry-Edwards campaign, then he is a reprobate.

REPROBATES OF THE LAW

I haven’t been following too closely the soap opera between political rivals Republican Mike Cox, the current attorney general for Michigan, and Democrat Geoffrey Fieger, the obnoxious trial lawyer gunning to unseat Cox in the next year’s election.  I’m not one to pompously dismiss fistfights like this by drawing a moral equivalence between the combatants.  The fact is, even in a very ugly dispute, usually one side is right and the other is wrong – and so the distinction should be acknowledged.  However, this is the unusual case in which it’s safe to say both Cox and Fieger are reprobates.

Earlier this year Cox launched an investigation of Fieger to determine whether or not the politicking attorney had secretly dumped nearly a half million into an ad campaign last year to stop the re-election of Stephen Markham to the Michigan Supreme Court.  In turn, an associate of Fieger’s allegedly attempted to blackmail Cox into dropping the investigation by threatening to expose the attorney general’s extramarital affair.  Cox foiled the scheme a few weeks ago by publicly admitting to cheating on his wife.  Now last week, out of the blue, the feds have raided Fieger’s law offices apparently as part of a public corruption case.

Sure, it’s good that the attorney general’s office finally has public corruption in its sites, but then it’s curious that Cox is hammering a Democratic rival for his office while he has done nothing to clean up the sewer of bank fraud, environmental crimes, and official malfeasance in River City that has benefited area Republicans.  But then, how principled can a man be who breaks his vow of fidelity to his wife?  I’m no prude.  I just can’t get around the fact that a person cannot compartmentalize integrity.  If he’ll cheat here, he’ll cheat there.  So good riddance to Cox in next year’s election.

That’s no welcome to Fieger.  He is a self-aggrandizing egotist who hungers for the respectability of high office.  He has had enough scrapes with the law and professional ethics to give plausibility to the current accusations against him.  If Cox is abusing his office to settle political scores, his target Fieger is not the man of law and order to replace him.  After four decades under the control of that hack Frank Kelley, the Michigan Department of Attorney General shriveled into an office of cheap political stunts too impotent to fight the sophisticated white-collar and organized crimes that are beyond the ken of local law enforcement.  Neither Kelley’s successor, a man who can’t keep his pants zipped, nor his rival, a rich trial lawyer who thinks public offices exist to be bought, are the lawman to make the attorney general’s office into the crime-fighting institution it ought to be.

A pox on both these reprobates of the law.

THE WINE WILL FLOW AGAIN

A small step, but one in the right direction.  The Michigan Senate has denied the beer and wine wholesalers a monopoly on the distribution of wine to consumers, restaurants, and retailers.  Such a monopoly would have served no one’s interest except fattening the wallets of wholesalers at the expense of Michigan residents who purchase wine.  Worse, the monopoly would have likely forced many of West Michigan’s smaller wineries out of business, because a significant portion of their sales come from shipping direct instead of through a middleman.  So the end result of a wholesaler monopoly would have been you get to pay more for less choice.  As a consequence of the senate’s action, you can now buy wine directly from any winery in the country.

As I said, a small thing, but a good thing.  Perhaps now our politicians can look at busting up other monopolies, like letting groups other than the teachers union bid on public school teaching contracts.  (See Friday's article, which touches upon this.)  Now that would stir up real competition that would not only save the taxpayers money, but also connect the performance of teachers to the real world the rest of us in the private sector have to measure up to.

WHAT THE GRPS CAN LEARN FROM K-MART

School choice is the law of the land in Michigan.  No longer are parents compelled to send their children to a particular public school based upon where they live.  If a school in another district has room, their kids can go there.  Now that parents have this liberty, school choice has been a bane to the Grand Rapids public school district, hemorrhaging hundreds of students each year (nearly a thousand just this fall) to suburban districts – and the seven grand in annual state funding which follows each student to his or her new school.

The huge loss of those tax dollars has put the GRPS on the verge of bankruptcy.  So school superintendent Bert Bleke has demanded that at least a portion of that $7,000 should stay behind to fill the coffers of declining districts like his.  He complains that the “sudden” departure of students each year makes planning tough and so the GRPS must retain some of the state funds for the departing students to pay for the “transition”.  Hmm.  I’m not sure what is sudden or unpredictable about any of this.  The exodus each fall of city kids to suburban schools is well-established, so one wonders why Bleke and company simply don’t budget for the smaller student population.

Indeed, decline can be profitable.  Consider the example of K-Mart.  It lost out to tough competition from retailers like Wal-Mart, Costco, and Meijer’s.  It had to shut down stores by the score, but in doing so, the failing retailer had a lot of valuable infrastructure to sell off.  So much so, that K-Mart ended up with enough cash to buy that most venerable of all U.S. retailers, Sears & Roebuck.  The opportunity for the GRPS is not as dramatic, but it is similar.  But instead of exploiting apparent misfortune to slay sacred cows and innovate, all Bleke can do is moan that the taxpayers aren’t rewarding him sufficiently for the failure of his school district.

What should we expect?  This is the same man who thought it was a better deal to sell Huff elementary school to a developer who will demolish the building instead of a 40% higher offer from a company that would have kept the school open to local residents.  This is the same man who privatized the bus drivers but would never open the teaching contract to competitive bidding.  This is the same man who is going to stick with the GRPS for only five years, but will hang on long enough to double dip by drawing both a pension and a consulting fee from it.

Further proof that educators are the worst-suited people to run our public schools.

HEALTH CARE TOO EXPENSIVE? IT'S YOUR FAULT!

I don't expect much from the local TV news, so I don't usually criticize it.  However, Tom VanHowe and Suzanne Geha flacking for the Spectrum Health colossus on WOOD TV's evening news program last night was too much to ignore.

VanHowe and Geha reported that -- surprise! -- the cost of health care has gone through the roof in West Michigan and that they had information supplied by Priority Health to explain why.  What neither revealed is that Priority Health is the wholly-owned health insurance arm of Spectrum Health, and since the creation of the Spectrum Health monopoly in 1997 through the merger of Butterworth and Blodgett hospitals, West Michigan has gone from the cheapest region in the state for health care to the most expensive.  (Monopolies tend to do that, you know.)

Instead what the grusome long-in-the-tooth twosome reported is Priority Health's laundry list of things that you, the ordinary Joe, have done to jack up the cost of health care.  First of all, you're too old.  Also, you're too fat.  On top of that, you're too poor, forcing wonderful organizations like Spectrum to eat the costs of caring for you.  (Hmm, I don't actually recall getting a free ride on my medical bills, but if Spectrum ever did, you can bet it would pass the cost along to you.  Don't mistake those reserves it has as a well of charity.  They are needed to pay for land and buildings Spectrum board member Rich DeVos wants to sell or rent to the hospital.)

Again, I don't expect a lot from the TV news, but is it so much to have two experienced anchors do more than uncritically burp up the pablum Priority Health feeds them to mislead the public?  Maybe VanHowe and Geha can think about that the next time he's getting sloshed and she's mulling over why she couldn't hack it in a major media market.