Alternative New Media for the Gulf South
I think this is a good example of the type of public record Jim Hood and Stacey Pickering would fight tooth and nail to keep from the public. It appears those persistent rumors linking Walker’s doings at DMR to certain boat donation programs associated with CIAP buyout recipient David Harris has legs.
Company sues DMR over unclaimed boat ~ Anita Lee
From the communications I’m getting from new readers from the Jackson area a recap post appears in order. For those of you newbies not yet hip to the socio-political relationships of the players involved at DMR just make a special note of this Harris fella mentioned in Anita’s story above.
To catch up on certain of the major exposures involved for folks like former director Bill Walker along with certain of his political favorites, I highly recommend the series of posts here on Slabbed about the looting of the Coastal Impact Assistance Program as a good start.
Yesterday Karen Nelson added some color to the unfolding federal investigation into the DMR friends and family program disclosing a few things, one of which we knew in a general sense and one that we did not know. First off is the factoid we did not know:
The Director of the Land Trust for the Coastal Plain, Judy Steckler, appears to have a problem telling the truth about the Land Trust’s involvement as a financial intermediary in the DMR purchase of Former DMR Executive Director Bill Walker’s son Scott’s piece of land on Bayou Porteaux. Once known as a nonprofit with a sterling reputation the Land Trust has taking a major and well deserved beating for their role in what strongly appears to be a sophisticated, criminal enterprise. After yesterday’s story I do not see how the Land Trust can keep Ms. Steckler as its executive director but as we saw with the CMR it is possible the Board of Trustees of the Land Trust remains firmly in denial, in the process breaching their fiduciary duty to the organization.
Finally Nelson tells us in detail the FBI’s role in the investigation and one of the leads they are chasing using the same investigative technique the FBI used in the neighborhood canvas. It appears Bill Walker’s son Scott may need fabled beltway criminal defense attorney Bernie Grimm’s services again as the FBI has taken an interest in the DMR’s purchase of Walker’s lot. It is not much of a stretch to extrapolate that CIAP director Tina Shumate and her purchase of her parent’s property is also under the same scrutiny. How Shumate remains at DMR drawing a paycheck defies the imagination.
Next up Michael Newsom takes a stab at the DMR purchase of the old Winn Dixie property in the Pass. A couple of things stuck out at me the first being that the story photo appears to be the property across the street from the parcel purchased by DMR. Following is an aerial photo of the location with the slab and parking lot of the old Winn Dixie still visible.
We’ve been here and done this property on Slabbed way back on November 5 of last year. The Sun Herald protected the identity of the beneficiary of this DMR friends and family program purchase, Jackson based developer Gary Cress in their story. I well remember when the Pass Winn Dixie closed a month or so before Katrina. Cress was planning to develop the parcel into condos. The parcel across Henderson Avenue sold the summer before Hurricane Katrina for $800,000 with an eye toward the same purpose.
The $800,000 parcel on the right, over 3 acres of land, is lower in elevation than the Cress parcel and had never been developed since Hurricane Camille for that reason. It would seem to fit the DMR criteria for land purchases better than the old Winn Dixie site. It should also be lost on no one that land values on the Mississippi Coast reached their zenith that summer before Katrina as condomania swept the land. Today the parcel on the right is for sale by owner and I’m guessing the reason it has not sold, despite being on the market close to 7 years, is due to overvaluation associated with the original purchase in the summer of 2005. Continue reading “DMR Scandal Day 88: Screwing the pooch starring Billy Walker, the FBI and the Chipper”
There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Folks we all gotta take off our hats to the DMR Beat Team at the Sun Herald because the gang is doing a great job, especially in today’s day and age of the local newsroom cut to the bone by absentee investor owned chains like the Sun Herald’s McClatchy that struggle under massive corporate debtloads. Bad times in the newspaper industry are no secret but the Sun Herald’s reporting on the unfolding scandal at DMR should remind us all of the societal value of high quality investigative journalism.
I mention this because often times one has to often read between the lines in a straight news story to fully understand the situation the reporter(s) is (are) trying to convey. Today it does not take much reading to figure out the Sun Herald would love to fully flesh out this entire DMR topic but they feel stymied. Here’s a long winded explanation why.
Today’s top story on DMR by Anita Lee and Karen Nelson on Bill Walker’s Foundation is mostly a recap of previous reporting dating back to December 8, 2012. That said it had a few new quotes from CMR Chairman Vernon Asper and yes, he comes across as clueless Billy Walker tool, which he surely was considering he chaired the Commission on Marine Resources yet evidently knew next to nothing about what was going on at the agency. This in turn is a massive breach of Asper’s fiduciary duty as Chairman of the CMR but we need to circle that for now. It also had quotes from emails involving Bill Walker’s son Scott arranging one of those taxpayer funded fishin’ trips with representatives of an engineering firm out of Mobile, Thompson Engineering. It was nice to see the taxpayers bought beer and that Pascagoula Mayor and fellow crony capitalist Robbie Maxwell has entered into the equation. Maxwell, Pascagoula’s part time Mayor is as bad as Bill Walker folks, maybe even worse IMHO.
As bad as this is, and believe me what Phil Bryant’s coastal political cronies have done is very bad, none of this is new and Gov Phil, better than anyone should know exactly what I’m talking about as he was state auditor when it all came down: ENRON.
It was massive accounting frauds at ENRON and WorldCom that led to government regulation of large swaths of the CPA profession and deservedly so I’ll add. For instance at ENRON there was an ossified, ineffectual Board of Directors stacked with politically connected phonies like Senator Phil Gramm’s wife Wendy, an economist that could rationalize about anything. At DMR, by their own admission we have a Board of Trustees that had no clue what was going on and who evidently did not bother to engage their jobs beyond the free boat rides, fishing trips etc. When the people that are supposed to be running the show are asleep at the switch bad things happen as we found out at ENRON and now DMR.
ENRON used off balance sheet special purpose entities or (SPE in accounting lingo) as a major vehicle for much of the criminal activity that occurred DMR director Bill Walker created an off books foundation that sucked all manner of tax dollars away from DMR’ mission to support the boats Walker used to wine and dine everyone on the taxpayer dime and lord knows what else. Continue reading “DMR Scandal Day 80: This is too rich…….:-)”
A couple of events have recently taken me down memory lane to the post Katrina Coast circa late 2005-2006 and the reminder came via Women of the Storm which had a Mississippi Chapter. The membership in the group came from across the socio-economic-ethnic spectrum and their mission included traveling to DC after Hurricane Katrina raising awareness with Congress and the President on the unique issues that impacted this area post Katrina.
Later on the ladies from the Louisiana chapter would take a shot at the oil spill and received a few black eyes in the process as the group also became known as Women of the Oil. It seems the Mississippi chapter is far more environmentally friendly.
I mention this because the group has popped up here in Mississippi in the DMR scandal news cycle and as today’s latest installment of as the Good ol’ boys at DMR turns by Paul Hampton and Michael Newsom, Nonnie DeBardeleben of Women of the Storm is calling out the broom brigade for a clean sweep of upper management at DMR. Chair of the Mississippi Senate Ports and Marine Resources Committee Brice Wiggins appears to agree that the interim guy, Danny Guice, needs to remain just that, interim.
This is not about the worker bee employees at DMR, no siree. It is all about the all the politically connected piggies stinkin’ up the executive ranks. Brooms, many of ’em in fact, are exactly what is needed to remedy the situation.
As the scandal at DMR spreads across South Mississippi’s largely Republican political elites with the latest revelations of potential criminal misconduct by DMR Executive Director Bill Walker by the Sun Herald one naturally wonders why Governor Phil Bryant has chosen to sit on his hands leaving Walker in office.
If this had been a school secretary embezzling a few thousand dollars from the Student Activity Fund or a secretary at (insert name of state agency) doing same that person would be, at the minimum put on a leave of absence while the investigation sorted all the dirty deeds out. If you are a political appointee of Bryant on the other hand you get to keep your job and search for a graceful exit.
The latest revelation that Congressman Steven Palazzo’s father was involved in one of the OIG properties illustrate the breadth of the unfolding scandal, which literally stretches from coastal Mississippi straight to the Capitol City. If there is an honest GOP politician in Jackson the unwashed masses have yet to hear from ’em.
Suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief is a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a “human interest and a semblance of truth” into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.
Land swap for marina questioned by developer. ~ Mary Perez
So the DMR is actually considering swapping Harbor Landing, which taxpayers bought from the taxpayer real estate king David Harris for over $3.6 million plus 18 months of free use for a piece of larger parcel of undeveloped land on the Biloxi waterfront the owers could not sell in total for $2.5 million. This folks, sounds like DMR Director Dr Bill Walker math to me, but then again maybe that is why the Office of the State Auditor had investigators crawling all over Walker’s office around a week ago. I hear the OSA has taken an interest in taxpayer funded real estate transactions across the coast in fact. From my vantage point this area is indeed rich in scams and rife with fraud.
It’s the two state shuffle folks.
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