Well folks, we might as well declare open season on this one for Byron Lee has his own charity looting gig in Jefferson Parish dating back to around the same time the Dollar Bill Jefferson Crime Family was looting earmarks from charities in Orleans Parish. We included ol’ Ced in the post title because everytime he stopped short on the campaign trial Byron’s nose ended up parked in his hiney.
I mention this because Jeremy Alford over at the Jefferson Report has uncovered more problems with Lee connected charities and those don’t count the problems we’ve been sitting on over here at Slabbed due to time constraints.
These reports on Richmond and Lee have legs and then some.
sop
And wouldn’t you just know it…a River Birch connection too !
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/waggaman
GATE: The “link” doesn’t “work”. Ashton.
Thanx Ashton…the topix link was a link to this partial T-P story which is archived:
Money from landfill misses target
Little of it goes to help Waggaman
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
By Meghan Gordon
West Bank bureau
Elected six years after the bitter dispute over a West Bank landfill, Jefferson Parish Councilman Byron Lee inherited a settlement fund that the dump owner gave the Waggaman community in exchange for a parish permit to start piling trash onto land a few blocks from their homes.
Owners of the River Birch landfill agreed in 1997 to pay $70,000 a year for a decade to the 3rd Council District, as a concession to Waggaman residents who protested fiercely against the zoning request to build what now ranks as the state’s largest landfill.
In his first term that ends this month, Lee gave $20,000 of the settlement to Waggaman civic projects and $10,000 to nearby Kennedy Heights, spending the rest of the $235,000 total elsewhere in his district far from the landfill that spawned the lawsuit.
Despite protests from his Waggaman constituents, Lee plans to send nothing to the community this year, giving the $10,000 left in the account for the year to two nonprofits, neither of which is registered in public databases, including the secretary of state’s corporation registry, a national listing of nonprofit organizations or local phone books.
“The money that comes out of the River Birch settlement needs to stay in Waggaman,” said George Peterson, president of the S1 Civic Group. “He needs to stop giving it to his pet projects.
“The people of Waggaman are the ones who went and fought for this, and we deserve it.”
The Jefferson Parish Council is expected today to approve Lee’s final two checks out of the account for the year. He wants to give $5,000 to the Third District Community Association and $5,000 to New Day Christian Ministries Center.
Lee did not return calls to his office and cell phone Monday and Tuesday.
The settlement documents give the 3rd District councilman discretion to spend the annual payments within his jurisdiction, but landfill neighbors argue that the money was clearly intended to go to residents who share roads with streams of garbage trucks and the homeowners who can smell in their backyards odors from the cluster of landfills that also includes the Jefferson Parish Landfill and the now-defunct GNO Landfill….
THE WHOLE STORY IS ARCHIVED
On the topic of landfills and looting: I have it on good authority that the Finance Director Gwen Bolotte was instructed by one Tim Whitmer and Tom Wilkinson to ‘disappear’ a bunch ( lots of zeroes) of money from the JP Landfill account(s) to make it look like the Parish was losing money on it and/or did not have enough to keep it open. Rumor has it she told them it was not going to be easy to move that much money as quickly as they wanted it moved.
And now she is rumored to be the one pointing the finger at Cheereen Gegenheimer. Cannot for the life of me figure out what those two can have fueded over.
Wonder if anyone has asked her about the $ disappearance? Ought to speed up any questions to her since she is just about out of her ‘DROP’ period for retirement.
IMHO if Wilkinson was the lynchpin to unhinge the Parish corruption, Bolotte is the nail in the coffin if she starts singing.
This article by Richard Rainey details a timeline of how Whitmer and Bolotte manipulated the landfill budget in both the 2009 and 2010 budgets.
River Birch landfill deal evolved from Tim Whitmer’s budget cut http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/04/river_birch_landfill_deal_evol.html#comments
Whether Bolotte is employed by the Parish or retired from the Parish should not affect the U.S. Attorney’s ability to ask her questions relating to this and other questionable practices.
I can’t believe that,
Well believe this. That game of hide the money between Whitmer and Bolotte has a history that began in 2004. In an interview that Wilkinson had with Val Bracy four weeks before he resigned, Wilkinson was confronted with minutes of a meeting of a committee allegedly constituted to study the issue of ‘woody waste’
Bracy brought to Wilkinson’s attention, that the use of the appropriations clause in the contract between Waste Management and JP had been made part of the minutes. After being hammered by Bracy on this issue, Wilkinson finally admitted that there were “certain” Council members who were favoring such a tactic to breach WM’s contract at that time. Byron Lee and Elton Lagasse were two Council members on that committee. That was 2004!
There is, of course, plenty conspiracy stuff in between 2004 and now which I have written about in my guess post on Slabbed relating to Wilkinson as a principal in this debacle; the “facilitator” of the corruptive forces which have since been exposed in this River Birch scheme.
What I am suggesting and what I believe is that the beginnings of the criminal conspiracy to award River Birch a landfill monopoly had it’s genesis in 2004. And that certain Parish Officials were in collusion with the principals of River Birch at that time to set in motion certain events to acheive this illegal end.
And, had it not been for Whitmer becoming aware sometime in early October that he was a target in a burgeoning Federal Investigation that rippled from his good buddy Hubbard’s plea of guilty in another matter, he probably would have stuck to his original plan; to have it appear in the budget that there was no money ‘appropriated’ to pay Waste Management, hence the contract could be breeched without the Parish being liable for damages as per the contract’s appropriation clause. Or so he thought.
Whitmer, in reversing the order to hide the money, sensed that this machination as others he had being covering up, such as the insurance scam, were soon to be made public and expose him to consequences beyond what his arrogant and greedy little mind could imagine !
And this Council of Clowns, in an attempt to cover up their complicity in this conspiracy, voted to pay Waste Management what was owed as of that October Council meeting; and further, passed a resolution for funds to pay WM the following year to be made part of the 2010 budget.
And there is still so much more to tell…later.
GEORGE PETERSON IS A CRIMINAL JUST LIKE THE REST. HIS GUN SHOP IS NO MORE AND HE TOOK ALOT OF FOLKS MONEY IN THE PROCESS. DIDN’T PAY HIS STAFF AND RAN OFF INTO THE NIGHT. ALOT OF QUESTIONS NEED TO ANSWERED NOW!