The Holiday Market venture certainly didn’t live up to the hype, unfortunately, but even more troubling is the lack of accountability for the public’s money.
At a private City Hall meeting on the final report by Global Spectrum on the Holiday Market in May, USA Niagara’s Chris Schoepflin and Global Spectrum Manager Ryan Coate insisted in response to a letter from Council Chairman Sam Fruscione that the salaries of the Holiday Market event “were private.” It was Coate who was responsible for monitoring the expenses of the Holiday Market for developer Mark Rivers.
Can you imagine such a response about the public’s money? How could Rivers escape accounting for how he spent the $114,000 in salaries for the event when most of the money was public money? And Schoepflin, who is paid a hefty salary himself as the head of a state subsidiary agency, agreed with Coate that the public was not entitled to know who got paid and other details of how the more than $460,000 was spent.
Schoepflin’s USA Niagara Development Corporation’s contract with the city expires at the end of the year and two of the council members who were at that “private” meeting in May will likely remember Schoepflin’s view that the public should be kept in the dark on how its money was spent at the Holiday Market.
We have filed our own FOIL request on USA Niagara and expect to learn in great detail how they spend their money because according to the Committee on Open Government, as a subsidiary of Empire State Development, which clearly constitutes an “agency,” their records are subject to the Freedom of Information Law.
And just for the record, Schoepflin, a well-paid public servant who is accountable to the taxpayers, refuses to return telephone calls from this newspaper. As he stated at the “private” City Hall meeting (which we had to FOIL to find out what happened), it is his view that taxpayers were not entitled to know how their money was being sent. Well Mr. Schoepflin, we’re going to find out how you are spending public money and hold you accountable. That’s why we have a Committee on Open Government to pull back the covers on public officials who want to keep everything secret. |