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Budget hubbub haunts air base
BY MARK FONTECCHIO
The Patriot Ledger
Published Aug. 28, 2004
Almost $1 million for legal fees. Tens of thousands of dollars for Internet services. Thousands in consulting fees. And $62 for long underwear. Those are just a few of the things the agency overseeing the former South Weymouth Naval Air Station spent money on last year.
An advisory board that reviews the South Shore Tri-Town Development Corporation's budget is asking pointed questions about money spent during the fiscal year that ended June 30, and has executive director Daniel DeSantis in its sights.
While the 1,405-acre base has remained mostly dormant since it closed seven years ago, spending by the public corporation in charge of overseeing its redevelopment has taken on some unexpected twists.
A detailed examination of Tri-Town's fiscal 2004 budget by The Patriot Ledger this week reveals reasons why some people in Weymouth, Rockland and Abington - the towns on which the base sits - are upset. Among the findings:
- Tri-Town spent more than $960,000 in legal fees last year, an average of $1.83 per minute. That bill accounted for almost half of all Tri-Town spending.
- Spent close to $170,000 to have its web site and computer network maintained and to license software.
- Spent almost $80,000 in fees and expenses for the Yardley Group, a nonprofit company that helped Tri-Town negotiate a business agreement with the master developer, Lennar Partners.
"You look at it and try to figure out if this is the best use of the money they had," said Bill Clark, an advisory board representative from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. "The short answer is no."
Tri-Town spent $2.2 million last year, the same amount it took in from from renting space on the base and from state grants. Meanwhile, there has been no new development on the base and no return for the three towns that are supposed to profit from it.
Clark was particularly critical of restaurant bills that went on Tri-Town's tab. The agency dished out $2,884 on food, including 28 visits last year to restaurants and a handful of in-house events.
The bills ranged from $9.95 at the pizza chain Sbarro to $780 for a catered luncheon from On the Table in Hingham for Tri-Town staff, consultants and Lennar officials.
DeSantis defended the expenditures, saying the meals often followed long days of negotiating that spilled over into dinner conversations with Mary Jo Ruccio, a senior partner at the Yardley Group.
Clark doesn't see it that way and questions why a public entity like Tri-Town is acting like a private company, wining and dining clients. That question is now at the center of the debate: Should Tri-Town behave like a private corporation or a form of municipal government?
"I think that if it were a private development, some of these things would be OK," Clark said. "But this is more like creating a whole new municipality, and when they create that, they have to be treated like a municipality."
And that means the public has a right to nitpick every single line item in the budget, whether it be $3.99 for hornet spray or $2,700 to repair a 1994 Ford Aerostar van, he said.
Advisory board members also asked about $1,900 Tri-Town spent on rental cars for a consultant, $904 for meals and lodging at a three-day conference in Cincinnati in September, and a pair of long underwear that cost $61.95.
Local residents were puzzled why Tri-Town's secretary, Mary Cordeiro, needed to buy long underwear on the company's dime.
Tri-Town officials said it was a legitimate expense. The Navy, which still owns most of the base land, wanted Tri-Town to take an inventory of property left behind in one of the base buildings. Rick Packard, Tri-Town's facilities manager, asked Cordeiro to help him check out the unheated 45,000-square-foot building. The two went back every Friday for several
months during the winter to count everything and compiled an inventory two inches thick.
Cordeiro needed long johns to bear the cold, Packard said.
"This staff has to be multifaceted," Packard said. "You have to be able to adapt, no doubt about it."
That goes for DeSantis as well. On Thursday, Packard needed to move a port-a-potty but couldn't do it himself. The head honcho grabbed the other side and away it went.
"If it has to be done, we do it," DeSantis said.
But the anecdotes don't count for much when people are questioning the big bills, such as the $1 million price tag on legal work. Eugene Blanchard, an advisory board member who is also an attorney for Rockland-based Tedeschi Realty Corp., said Tri-Town could have hired several staff lawyers and not spent that much money.
DeSantis said that in addition to helping Tri-Town negotiate a lengthy business agreement with Lennar, lawyers also kept busy negotiating with the Navy over several hundred acres yet to be transferred to Tri-Town. DeSantis said he didn't realize how long negotiations with Lennar and the Navy would take, and how heated some of the discussions would be, some of them ending when one side stormed out and slammed a door or hung up the phone.
The two negotiations ended very differently. Lennar and Tri-Town signed a business agreement in April. But the Navy has balked at turning over the land to Tri-Town because Lennar's plans for the land - up to 3,000 new houses - doesn't square with what the Navy thought was going to happen there.
The Navy has previously turned over base land to Tri-Town based on a 1998 development plan that called for 700 senior-housing units only and much more retail space than Lennar has in mind now. So Tri-Town remains empty-handed and with legal bills to pay for failed negotiations.
On Sept. 23, Lennar will unveil its new reuse plan. DeSantis is ready.
"The scope of this project is huge," he said. "It is a very complicated thing. It's the hardest thing I've ever done."
That much is clear. On Thursday, DeSantis and Packard were driving to their office when Packard lifted he baseball cap he was wearing.
"Whenever someone complains, I say they should spend a week with us," Packard said. "See if you'll have any hair left."
Both men are balding.
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