Pretty scary huh? In spite of a court probe, they still didn't do their job properly!
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By Timothy J. Gibbons .
December 22, 2011 - 08:29pm
Despite grand jury probe, JEDC continued to let deals go unreviewed
Just a few years after the Shipyards Project debacle, in which a grand jury found the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission didn’t adequately monitor how millions of taxpayer dollars were spent, the JEDC’s small staff was letting other deals go unreviewed.

Those findings, part of a report released by the council auditor Wednesday, surprised Adam Hollingsworth, chief of staff to former Mayor John Peyton, who was in office during the 2007-to-2010 period the audit examined. Peyton declined to talk about the audit Thursday.

“We took compliance seriously, and I know the JEDC took it seriously,” Hollingsworth said Thursday.
The mayor’s office hired additional compliance staff for the JEDC in the wake of the Shipyards problems, he said.

In that situation, which occurred in the John Delaney administration, the grand jury found the JEDC paid out money without verifying work was done.

The recent audit charged the JEDC with improperly paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives and being careless in reviewing contractor expenditures.

Although the commission’s focus is on bringing companies to town, it is also the entity charged with making sure such companies lived up to their end of the deal. That task, however, appeared to fall by the wayside as the JEDC staff shrunk from more than 40 people to around a dozen.

Hollingsworth did acknowledge that shrinking staff could lead to problems.

“One of the things we always said in the midst of budget reduction is we were making the best of the bad decisions available to us,” he said.

However, the former chief of staff said he had not yet read the audit and didn’t want to deal with hypotheticals.

To be sure, the audit report paints the most dire picture of the agency, which did not officially respond to the findings, as is typical. In most audits, the responses will discuss ameliorating factors, something absent here.

“That’s disappointing,” Kerri Stewart, Peyton’s chief administrative officer, said about the lack of response. “This is a raw audit. There could have been an audit finding and a response.”

Still, she said, as the staff shrunk, it was possible the JEDC had trouble juggling its responsibilities.

“The primary focus of that agency and where resources were placed was on creating jobs, not on compliance monitoring,” she said.

It’s unclear what other oversight the organization had. Unlike independent authorities, the JEDC executive director reported to the mayor, with its board serving only as advisers. The commission members’ responsibility is to vet deals brought to them, not oversee operations the way a board at an independent agency would.

“It was much more an advisory role, a policy role,” said Bob Rhodes, a longtime commission member who stepped down as chairman at the end of 2008. “For the most part, the commission was relying on staff, not getting involved in day-to-day procedures.”

Former Executive Director Ron Barton, who was in charge during the audited years and resigned after Mayor Alvin Brown took office, did not return messages left on his cellphone. Also unresponsive was acting Executive Director Paul Crawford, who is traveling.

The Council Auditor’s Office report came after years of caviling about the organization.

The Concerned Taxpayers of Duval County had been pushing for an audit since around 2006, said Tony Bates, a former leader of the group, initially because of philosophical objection to incentives.

Those objections turned into more practical concerns when the group was unable to get from the JEDC information such as number of jobs created.

Such concerns led some City Council members to ask for the audit, which began in July.

The results were worrisome, said Councilman Clay Yarborough, one of those who made the request.

“It’s a very concerning report,” Yarborough said. “Council members and the mayor are trying to be be very diligent, but have an agency that may not be able to handle taxpayer dollars.”

Yarborough said he wasn’t sure how the council will now deal with JEDC, which brings projects to the council for approval on a regular basis.

“If we now have reason to believe the dollars are not being spent as they should be,” he said, “we shouldn’t be approving them.”

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-12-22/story/despite-grand-j...