By:  Diane Benjamin

Every once in a while I have to clean up some files.  I found a FOIA request I received in December of 2015.

It clearly shows that John Butler and CIAM pretended they had no responsibility to the City of Bloomington and the taxpayers forced to cover their losses.  I remember filing this FOIA because I heard CIAM had problems with the State and submitting the proper amount of Sales Tax.  The State claimed their records were exempt from FOIA, so I never found out if anything I heard was true.

Note my request was denied in full!

Taxpayers own the Coliseum – not John Butler or CIAM.  They were hired to run the place, not create their own secret society within the walls of your asset.

Here’s the reason given for the denial:

Using the City’s logic, CIAM could have pocketed every bit of the Sales Tax until the State closed in and shut them down.  CIAM could have created whatever numbers they wanted for the State Tax returns and again the State could have audited them, severely fined them, or shut them down.

For all we know, the State did take action to collect unreported Sales Tax, fined them, and taxpayers picked up the cost because it was hidden in the losses you had to cover.

Obviously the City did no oversight and didn’t care.  As I reported for years, the audited financial statements showed much larger losses than the statement prepared by John Butler and crew.  The City didn’t care then either.

Would you hire somebody to run your business and only look at financials once a year after an audit?  Would you then ignore the audit results?

I hope the trials starts soon and some City leaders are put under oath to explain themselves.  I wonder who really wants a plea bargain so they never have to answer questions.  I’d put David Hales at the top of the list.

.

.

.