The Long and Winding Road

With apologies to the Beatles, the long and winding road that leads to the eventual release of the forensic audit report took a bizarre twist this week with the announcement by Mayor Hanlon that the US Attorney's office was now involved in the "investigation." The Mayor claimed, in a public statement read to the Common Council, that in addition to the Inspector General, the Attorney General and the US Attorney had also been consulted in the past few months, and the US Attorney's office had contacted him over last weekend to request an additional 30 days to complete their investigation.

Wow. These are quite the revelations, given that for the past several weeks, the Mayor has been promising the release of the audit as soon as the final signed report was received. There has never been any mention of the AG or the US Attorney prior to this announcement. This was a jolting turn in the long and winding road.

Call us crazy (and many of you will, in colorful language), but something doesn't seem quite right here. When the public discussion of the audit first began last June, the Mayor insinuated sinister goings on from the previous administration had been discovered when he came into office. When he appeared before city government requesting the $60,000 appropriation to pay for the audit, he wouldn't elaborate on what the issues were but assured us that it was "serious."

Months went by, and finally, several weeks ago, the Mayor was requested to appear before the Common Council for an update. By this time, he had received a draft of the report but was still unwilling to share any of the results. Since that time, the road has become a little bumpy, as the Mayor has made a number of contradictory statements in his appearances before the Common Council.

First, he and his advisors were reviewing the draft report; no changes would be made to the draft, he said, but there were some points of it that needed clarification -- the infamous "if I can't understand it, the average person won't understand it" gaffe. The Mayor also said that once the final report was received, it would only be released in Executive Session because the results may implicate particular individuals. He later had to retract that statement because, he said, he was advised that once the final signed report was received, it was a public document and had to be released to whoever wanted to see it.

Next, the report was back in the hands of Melanson and Heath, taking weeks to complete, which seemed odd if there were no edits being made to it. How long does it take to fix one typo and return the report? Again, the Mayor assured us that as soon as the report was received, the Council would be the first ones to see it. He also, at that time, mentioned four of the five departments that had been the focus of the audit, unable to remember the fifth one.

That brings us to this past Monday, and the sudden involvement of the AG and the US Attorney, the Mayor's announcement that, once again, the report would only be released in Executive Session, his statement that no one in City Hall other than himself had read the audit, and his claim that he would not release the departments covered in the audit when he had already listed out four of them two weeks ago. But let's look at the most . . . questionable . . . claim made at this meeting.

The Mayor's claim that an agency that has never before been mentioned in any discussion of this audit was now requesting an additional 30 days to complete an investigation that had apparently been going on for at least a few months seems . . . suspect. His claims that he gave the US Attorney's office his own deadline -- "I told them that they had to tell me exactly what they needed -- if they needed 30 days, they had to tell me now; I told them that on April 23, no matter what you say, I'm releasing the report"-- seems completely ridiculous. The US Attorney's office does not accept ultimatums from local elected officials. The US Attorney's office, under the jurisdiction of the federal Department of Justice, will not be dictated to. This is a department that manages homeland security, investigates terrorist threats against the United States, and has hunted down some of the most dangerous criminals in history. Yet the Mayor of Everett claims to be dictating terms on what, to them, has to be one of the lowest level investigations ever conducted, if it's being conducted at all.

Only time is going to tell what lies at the end of this long and winding road. Will it be Hanlon's pot of gold, or the equivalent of Al Capone's vault -- a whole lot of empty?