By: Diane Benjamin
A month or so ago I heard a rumor about the City of Bloomington’s garbage trucks. The rumor was that at least some of the trucks were ordered with air conditioning by mistake. When the trucks arrived the air conditioner was taken out.
So, I did a FOIA request:
The first response included this document:
I only asked for invoices, obviously this isn’t an invoice – but it came in handy later. The City asked for an extension on everything else.
A few days later I got the invoices – a lot of them. That’s when the chart came in handy. The invoices only matched the chart they provided for ONE vehicle. Some of the invoices had no description of the work done.
I emailed them back asking for the rest of the invoices and details on the invoices that didn’t have them. Today I got this response:
Nothing I received listed taking out the air conditioning, but then I didn’t receive invoices for all the work that was done.
So, either they are
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hiding that information
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or their record keeping is so bad they can’t find the invoices.
Which do you think it is?
When we can’t get answers, we fill in the blanks ourselves.
Maybe Normal could give Bloomington classes on transparency!
Do they own the fleet or do they lease the fleet? Who does the repair work? Obviously they are not going to provide copies of Purchase Orders, Work Orders, or whatever documents they use to drive payment to the entity doing the repair work.
I pretty sure they own them. Might have used their capital lease program to buy them. I have the purchase invoices
Regardless of any city accounting errors, I would hope that all the garbage trucks would have A/C for the sake of the hard working Garbage Men.
Wasn’t that one of Commissar Renner’s campaign issues “Poor City Employee Morale”? Well I am sure that got the government unions to cough up big campaign bucks. I wish he would worry more about “Taxpayer Morale”!