By: Diane Benjamin
The media has never reported on my lawsuit against the City of Bloomington and Central Illinois Arena Management (CIAM) – the old Coliseum manager. John Butler was the principal agent for CIAM. Possible fraud or abuse of taxpayers isn’t news.
The lawsuit is based on a denied FOIA for the 2014 concession reports and the payroll. The lawsuit has been going on for close to a year. I first filed with Lisa Madigan’s office, but many months of inaction by her Public Access office forced me to file in court.
The CIAM contract required them to keep records for three years. I recently filed a FOIA request for 2013 and 2015 concession reports. I knew when I filed it the request was going to be denied, and it was:
Allow me to give you a simple example of what CIAM is doing:
You invest in 10 Coke machines and scatter them around town. You don’t want to fill the machines with products yourself, so you hire a kid to do it for you. The kid fills the machines and collects the money, he gets a percentage of the sales.
After a month the kids hands you $25.00 and proclaims that’s your share, but he won’t tell you how much money was collected in total. You have NO idea if $25.00 is the right amount or if it should have been $250.00 or more.
CIAM is that kid. City officials never checked what CIAM said taxpayers earned. During settlement talks I’ve heard that both the City and CIAM say they never thought there was a problem, of course nobody was looking for one either.
Is your government looking out for you?
(got any other good jokes?)
The next court date is July 21st at 1:15. It could get fun, spectators are more than welcome! Concerned involved citizens scare authority.
Until this is resolved, the spirits of past management will continue to haunt the Coliseum and City officials who didn’t do their due diligence with your money.
That’s a great analogy! Unfortunately most of the council hasn’t a clue, the mayor doesn’t care and the city manager is an idiot.
Sounds about like LeRoy
What does that mean?
I’m not sure how they are using “proprietary” as a means of protecting the information. That in itself should be challenged.
If you look up the legal definition they are on questionable grounds using that reason. How would keeping that information from the public jeopardize making themselves more successful? What, successful at hiding profits due the taxpayer?
Honesty and truth doesn’t hide, nuff said.
First off . . . they put a yellow-belly-ed sapsucker in charge of collecting receipts and enforcing a contract.