It's a scandal.

Attention, Fayette District

Attorney Bill McBroom and Fayette State Court Solicitor Steve Harris:

You two have some work to do in Peachtree City.

Public employees running the

cash register for a private for-profit business.

Public money being mixed willy-nilly

with private sales, and no accounting at all of what belong to which.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of dollars are involved

here.

A for-profit monopoly retail

business operating rent-free in an expensive city-owned facility. (What

a sweetheart deal. Does the city have any rent-free space it can let me

use? I can make good use of it.)

Who owns this business, and

who gets the benefits of the sales? Is it the publicly-paid executive

director of a local government entity that runs the city-owned facility?

A $366,000 secret contract

with a major sponsor obligating the cash-strapped Development Authority

of Peachtree City (DAPC) to guarantee huge quantities of sales in this

privately-owned retail business, and DAPC never even voted on it, maybe

never even knew about it until this month.

And is there another secret

sponsor contract out there that has yet to be disclosed?

A $200,000 bank loan to the

DAPC that magically appears. Where is the record of a public vote on this

obligation?

Secret meetings, secret deals,

secret obligations.

A year after an auditing firm

warned of woefully inadequate accounting of public money, the financial

picture involving two multi-million-dollar city-owned venues is even murkier

now than it was a year ago.

Nobody can say with any confidence

what is really going on at the tennis center and amphitheater that Peachtree

City taxpayers own.

They face a cash flow crisis

and can't borrow any more money.

Folks, you've got a genuine

scandal on your hands, and a local government entity, the DAPC, is fully

responsible for this foul mess.

It's clear now, even to the

willfully blind, the DAPC is incapable of managing the financial affairs

of the two venues it is charged with overseeing. And it's similarly clear

that the Authority's executive director is out of control. He should be

fired forthwith.

Vice Chairman Scott Bradshaw,

a class act and a true public servant, did the only honorable thing left

to him to do and resigned from the Authority Tuesday. In parting, he delivered

in measured, gentlemanly tones a devastating critique of the Authority's

failure to come to grips with its own ineptness.

His letter is reprinted in

full within these pages and is also on our Web site. Also available is

the "contract" between Adidas and DAPC, as well as an excerpt

from last year's audit summary.

As he notes in an interview

with our reporter, J. Frank Lynch, Bradshaw is no friend of the current

mayor. But Bradshaw's blistering summary of mismanagement and management

concealment of crucial financial matters fully vindicates nearly everything

Steve Brown has been saying about the Authority's faulty oversight of

the Tennis Center and the Fred Brown Amphitheater for more than a year

now.

Most troubling, perhaps, is

the unauthorized and secret deal Executive Director Virgil Christian made

with Adidas that obligated the Authority for more than $366,000 in sales

through the privately-owned pro shop that is not controlled by the Authority.

For that deal, DAPC gets $15,000

in t-shirts and travel bags to give away to tennis center and amphitheater

fans, plus the shoemaker's logo on some tournaments. In return, Adidas

requires DAPC to "guarantee Adidas sales" of $366,000 over the

life of the five-year contract.

Bradshaw says the contract

was never even discussed, let alone approved in any vote, by DAPC. The

February 2002 contract that virtually gives away the city's store has

Virgil Christian's signature on it. Bradshaw says he had to ask "three

or four times for a copy of the agreement" before finally receiving

it two weeks ago.

Is DAPC on the hook for $366,000

in sales of Adidas products solely through one privately-owned, non-rent-paying

pro shop on city property? That's a question that high-priced lawyers

will debate, costing Peachtree City taxpayers yet more money.

Here are other management missteps:

Withholding news of an impending

cash crisis until just before the DAPC's fiscal year ends later this month.

Bradshaw said management had consistently portrayed a rosy financial picture

up until disclosing on Sept. 15 that DAPC likely couldn't meet payroll

or pay $50,000 for the band in the upcoming final concert series at the

amphitheater.

(An aside: We note that the

amphitheater's office manager is running for city council. It will be

interesting to learn from her whether she was aware of the dire financial

situation confronting the venue.)

Ignorance of or disdain for

common accounting principles, despite being warned in an outside audit

last year of the confusing or missing financial statements. "Key

members of management [read: Virgil Christian or the Authority chairman,

take your pick] did not contain an adequate level of knowledge and control

over the accounting function," reads the Sept. 30, 2002, audit report.

"We encountered several examples of this throughout the audit, including

not being furnished with amounts owed by the Authority ... until after

our audit fieldwork was complete. Management should take more of a role

in the accounting function of the Authority and obtain the knowledge necessary

to make management decisions."

Wow! In that dry, bean-counter's

language is as devastating a portrayal of a financially-out-of-control

entity as you are likely to see in public documents.

Now this is the same DAPC and

management team that have been praised to the sky by former Mayor Bob

Lenox and others.

That was a year ago. Has it

improved in a year's time? Bradshaw says, "Individual Authority members

have worked diligently with staff on this issue, even helping to reformat

the budget report. However, much of the information received by the Authority

is still vague and it is difficult for members to have confidence in the

financial picture as presented."

Again, wow! Could it be more

devastating an indictment of either ignorance or protracted, ongoing mismanagement?

An executive director who

either ignores or deliberately misleads his board of directors, the DAPC.

Christian fired the outside

auditor "without vote of the Authority." He ignored a hiring

freeze and hired two full-time and two part-time workers "in clear

violation of the mandate. There was never a vote by the Authority to make

an exception or waive the hiring freeze," Bradshaw wrote.

The director signed a contract

obligating the DAPC to $366,000 in sales through the store he operates,

but there is no record he ever asked the Authority's permission nor is

there any vote that DAPC ever approved such a one-sided giveaway. The

director did get named to the Adidas Advisory Board, presumably a prestigious

coup for him.

This is the same privately-owned,

for-profit business that operates rent-free inside the tennis center,

with DAPC-paid employees running the cash register and selling the store's

merchandise for the benefit of private owners.

All that money, from tennis

court fees that belong to the DAPC to sales of Adidas clothing and tennis

balls belonging to the for-profit pro shop, goes into the same pot and

nobody can tell you with any accounting certainty which part is public

and which part is private.

That's called "commingling"

and it is an accounting and legal "no-no."

And here's an eerie echo of

Mayor Brown's yearlong jeremiad about the cost overruns for the tennis

center expansion:

"There has been no consolidated

final report to the DAPC or to the public detailing the exact expenditures

and final cost related to the Amphitheater administration office/SCT building

renovation (approximately $200,000) or the Tennis Center expansion project

(approximately $2 million)," Bradshaw wrote.

"Members of the Authority

have been provided with a variety of somewhat disconnected change orders,

contracts and partial lists of unpaid supplier and subcontractors,"

Bradshaw wrote. "It is very difficult for anyone to clearly understand

the total financial picture related to these critical expenditures."

Double wow! This from an insider

for the past four years. Is not this exactly what the mayor has been shouting

for more than a year to anyone who would listen?

More from Bradshaw: "This

issue is particularly important because of the controversy related to

the cost overruns and the Authority's present inability to pay very large

amounts of money owed to Group VI and other companies. Some Authority

members were unaware of most of the cost overruns until the project was

complete and the mayor [Brown] was quoted in the newspaper about cost

overruns. The circumstances that permitted these cost overruns WITHOUT

VOTE OF THE AUTHORITY [my emphasis] should be better clarified and corrected."

Triple wow! Former Mayor Lenox

and various also-rans, I'm sure current Mayor Steve Brown would appreciate

your phone calls acknowledging your mistaken support of an insupportable

situation.

Attention, District Attorney

Bill McBroom and state court Solicitor Steve Harris. You two have some

obligations to the public here, to find out what has been going on with

public money, public meetings and public facilities.

It's obvious that DAPC has

miserably mismanaged the amphitheater and the tennis center, utilizing

millions in public funds. The DAPC is in the throes of a financial crisis,

with more questions than answers about how we got into this fine mess.

Now the remaining DAPC members

should own up to their past mistakes and fire the executive director immediately

before he can sign more unauthorized contracts or initiate more unsanctioned

cost overruns.

They should require that for-profit

pro shop to pay market rent for its space. They should stop providing

free employees for that private company, public employees that are being

paid for by a government entity, the DAPC, with public money.

And then the board can do one

more honorable thing: En masse, they can resign and give the City Council

the opportunity to get some auditors in there to account for public money

and public facilities' use and clean up this miserable mess that has been

made.