Cronyism Rides Victorious Again
The would be CRVA for short, also known as the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, last seen coming under fire from councilmembers who earlier this year were thumping their chests and demanding more accountability and better oversight of the tourism booster squad.
Since then, CRVA chieftain Tim Newman, who pockets an annual pay package in excess of $300,000, has become embroiled in pay-to-play allegations involving the awarding of lucrative taxi cab contracts for the airport. And now comes news that a CRVA executive has received $100,000 in bonus loot that had been earmarked from the CIAA basketball tournament. This from the uptown paper:
Ereka Crawford-Brim, an executive with the taxpayer-funded Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, received the money over four years. The commissioner of the CIAA, Leon Kerry, said he gave her the money for her help handling logistics for the tournament.
The CRVA’s ethics policy states that employees can’t accept cash or gifts from outside the CRVA payroll – a rule designed to keep employees from having a conflict of interest. That means Crawford-Brim couldn’t have accepted the money directly from the CIAA.
But CRVA chief executive Tim Newman told Kerry to pay the CRVA, which then cut Crawford-Brim the checks. Newman told the Observer last week the bonuses were OK because they were “salary” and not gifts.
Yes, and if you call a zebra a horse, its stripes disappear. The reality is that $100,000 ended up in the pocket of a CRVA executive when commonsense and basic ethics indicate it should not have.
Newman’s slick and sleazy semantics notwithstanding, however, Councilmember Warren Cooksey has a valid point when he argues that if the CRVA board of directors, which is appointed by the council, approved the payments, it’s OK. Same as Newman’s $300K-a-year salary is OK.
If the council wants to change that, councilmembers need to change the leadership structure and oversight of the CRVA. The empty squawking they’ve done over any and all problems CRVA related indicates council has no interest, other than maintaining the status quo. It’s much easier to continue to stomp up and down demanding answers, even when it’s become apparent that no acceptable ones will materialize.
Mayor Anthony Foxx was playing the same tune again during Monday night’s council meeting.
“My request at this point is that we get information from the CRVA board identifying facts related to the issues raised in that [Observer] story,” Foxx said. “Secondly, an analysis of whether there were any policies that were violated as a result of that. And finally, some assessment from our board which we appoint about whether there is a practice that would be put in place to address issues like that in the future, because there are a lot of questions.”
It seems there always are.
Answers, action, and consequences? That’s a different story.
And lest anyone forget, recall that councilmembers have for years, ever since they approved forking over $200K a year to the CIAA, been receiving free luxury box tickets to the popular basketball tournament for their largess with the taxpayers’ money. Ditto for county commissioners, until they finally changed their policy this year.
No conflict of interest there, right? And these are the folks outraged by a CRVA executive riding the same CIAA gravy train as councilmembers? And that’s supposed to change?
Give me a break. Cronyism rides victorious again.
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