Back in reality, the willingness of key city bureaucrats and contractors to keep the public in the dark is alarming. The audit cited staff-approved, public notices as misleading or dishonest about park finances and contracts. Krom wasn't bothered by the cheating or by the lack of cooperation the auditors received. For example, Stu Mollrich ordered investigators not to ask any questions of employees at Forde & Mollrich, the biggest recipient of Agran's questionable PR contracts. Marsha Burgess, once a government employee involved in the PR contract shenanigans and a Krom pal, refused to field a single question. Bureaucrats working for Sean Joyce—the $369,000-per-year city manager hired by Agran's council majority in 2004—blocked auditors from accessing city records that might explain money flowing through various accounts.
"I think you've gone out of your way to make people's actions appear more sinister than they are," complained Krom, who is such a la-la-land character that she described the audit as "maybe titillating," but certainly not "useful."
The Agran lapdog has demonstrated a fondness for uttering inadvertently hilarious gobbledygook. She may outdo herself this year. Though it was her allies who shut down auditors from following the park money trail in several instances, she had the audacity to complain the report is an "incomplete set of data."
Bob Aul
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Someone famous once observed, "Facts are stubborn things." But Krom apparently has a contrary view. As if discrediting the audit and saying something meaningful, she stated, "I think facts need to be understood as how important and significant they are."
In other words: Move on, folks. There's nothing here to see. Don't stare at this grisly collision of truth and shameless propaganda. Oh, and by the way, how about putting our Agran team back in power in Irvine?