UPDATE 4:
BVos, the Designated Conservative’s new E-critic, makes his debut. Click here to learn more!
UPDATE 3:
The following comment (excerpt below) was posted by “Mark H.” on Mark Maynard’s blog. “Mark H.” has gotten right to the heart of the problem with Ypsilanti’s past economic development efforts. It is interesting to note that it appears Brian Vosburg is the last of the principal players in local economic development hired by the City of Ypsilanti during Mayor Farmer’s tenure or by those she directly influenced – other than our “wishful=thinker-in-chief” (as Mark H. says):
Two public entities that are dear and near to my heart — EMU and the municipal government of the city of Ypsilanti — have both suffered from clinging too long to, being too reluctant to dismiss, top level managerial personnel whose actual job performances were demonstrably sub-standard. Both EMU and the city government are small enough that officials in both are well known around campus and around town; they cultivate friends; they are liked because of their friends, and their social ties and family situations often become important factors in how they are evaluated. Sometimes those unofficial ties of officials can unduly insulate officials from poor performance.
It’s not what you know or what you can do, it’s who you know and who owes you. Sub-standard performance continues, and often they are evaluated by sub-standard supervisors. Such situations are an affront to good government and a waste of the taxpayers’ money….
Ypsi and my university have both needlessly suffered due to long habits of tolerance of poor decision-makers being retained in decision making positions…. (F)or the city of Ypsilanti there’s that $20 million debt incurred to acquire a vacant lot of 38 acres, the disaster called Water Street (which was a disaster that a bunch of very nice people who engaged in years of wishful thinking but no hard-headed realistic analysis created for the city. The wishful thinker in chief who lead Ypsi into the Water Street disaster is of course still the City Manager).
So I am in favor of hard-headed decision makers making the painful choices that protect the public interest. I am in favor of rigorous performance reviews, and in favor of on going informal assessments of performance by supervising boards. I am against keeping anyone on a public payroll whose performance fails to meet rigorous standards….
Sadly, most American workers can be dismissed by their employers for any reason whatsoever: a union contract or discriminatory intent by the employer as a motivation for firing someone are among the very few restrictions on dismissing a worker. Writing grant applications is no doubt complex; but failure to do so in a timely and effective way is not an unprecedented basis for dismissal, to say the least. Grant writers do lose jobs for failure to win grants – and failure to meet a deadline has at least one predictable consequence: Failure to get the grant.
UPDATE 2: Ypsilanti DDA Director Brian Vosburg resigns.
A $900,000 mistake
The following is an excerpt from a recent Ypsilanti Citizen article (click here to read the entire piece):
Façade grant submissions by the Downtown Development Authority and the Depot Town Downtown Development Authority were automatically rejected due to late submissions.
The applications totaling approximately $900,000 worth of improvements to five buildings in Depot Town and one in Downtown were submitted electronically approximately 10 minutes late making them ineligible for review according to Brian Vosburg, Director for both Authorities.
“I will be doing what I am able to do to rectify the situation,” Vosburg said this afternoon. “It was late on a technicality due to the size of the document.”
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