China Syndrome
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- January
- 26
The Westchester County Board of Acquisitions & Contract has just awarded a $99,800 contract to the Westchester County Association for: “the provision of international relations consulting services, including management of a Westcheser County Business, Education & Culutural Center in China.”
The contract was slipped in by County Executive Andy Spano, who has taken several trips to China over the years and, no doubt, will again. A couple of years ago, he declined to cancel a planned trip even though there was a bitter, Bee-Line Bus strike going on. He took some political hits for it.
It’s hard to see what Westchester gets out of these China visits. Spano insists he’s establishing business ties, but the only thing substantial to come out of his office having to do with China is a mandatory recall of Chinese toys and other imported products tainted with lead-based paint.
Spano’s trips to China have not been funded by county taxpayers, but members of the influential County Association have accompanied him on a few of the trips.
So now we have this A and C contract, which was voted on by Spano, the county’s Public Works commissioner and Bill Ryan, the chairman of the county board of legislators. This is the taxpayers’ money…And one might ask: Who’s really benefitting in this deal?
This entry was posted
on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 3:39 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
Damn! One incredible thing after another. It’s like climbing into a Kafka novel and someone closes the book covers on you and you find yourself crawling among incoherent print looking for an exit. How long can this progressing nightmare continue?
Somethig, isn’t it? Ed, sorry about the steps involved in finding the blog.
And another thing, with all these paid “consultants” and “lobbyists,” no one should know better than the politicians themselves that these people provide “access” to decision-makers. Once access is accomplished, pocketsfull of money, payola and “donations” are the concomitant next step needed to accomplish the objective. Why Andy Spano or those of his ilk can’t contact someone like Silver directly, since he supposedly has no slush-fund for consultants and lobbyists to throw around to garner votes, boggles the logical mind. There is a pay-off of some kind here, and it makes one think that the new idea of pay-off is to pay-off the consultants or lobbyists themselves, directly. An enlightened, creative journalist would long ago have taken home a Pulitzer and the eternal thanks of a grateful populace if he initiated the investigation that brought these people to justice. It seems that the problem with that is, even when all the facts are on the table, the politicians have statutes in place that justify their larceny. They’ve become so bold that they now come close to acknowledging this.