The facts thusfar (and kudos to Shay Totten who almost single-handedly brought this issue out): Burlington Chief Administrative Officer Jonathan Leopold took it on himself to cut a $17 million loan (yes, that’s taxpayer money) to Burlington Telecom (the city-run telecom entity) without seeking approval from the Board of Finance or City Council. As a result, BT is now violating its “certificate of public good” issued by the state by not repaying the loan within 60 days (as well as by not expanding its network as promised). Given the current state of affairs, there is no guarantee that the citizens of Burlington are going to get that money back. These facts are not in dispute.

There are four elements to this that should surprise no one. First of all, that Leopold would engage in such an astonishing breach of ethics and rules. He’s historically just done what he wants to.

Second, that Bob Kiss doesn’t really give a damn if Leopold breaks the rules, as he’s consistently done whatever he can to keep Burlington Telecom protected from oversight and transparency. All I can assume is that its just another case of some on the left who decide the rules are there to control bad guys, and since they’re not bad, the rules don’t apply.

Third, that David O’Brien would be a drama queen about all this, leaping at the chance to be the hero and hoping that people will be distracted from his Fairpoint legacy, and other failures. He also wants the Douglas administration gold star award by giving Burlington the black eye ANR couldn’t manage.

Fourth, that the Burlington Free Press would jump on the pound-the-City bandwagon. They too look for any excuse to hammer the mayor’s office, and this one was gift wrapped.

Given these last two elements, why City officials would just hand their enemies a loaded gun and point it at their own temples like this is beyond me.

But what I really don’t understand is why the Burlington City Council went limp on all this. That’s the real mystery here, and the biggest breach of public trust in play. You can’t unite that crew over anything, but putting their own imprimatur on this behavior… this is what brings Republicans, Democrats, Independents and Progressives together? This? (And given the copious use of “executive sessions” shielded from public scrutiny, transparency is not a watchword for this crowd.)

On October 5th, the City Council just shrugged at the brewing scandal. No consequences, no nothing. Just its approval for the mayor’s office to seek to retroactively change the rules to accomodate the behavior, with broad promises that they’d report in more. Washington DC politics as usual, eh?

The only one who dissented was the biggest lightning rod on the Council; Ed Adrian. Adrian is a solid liberal, but is loathed by Progressives over his aggressive Democratic partisanship. So loathed by the Prog crowd in fact, that Progressive Representative David Zuckerman threw him out of his farm’s CSA over political differences. That’s some bad, bad feelings – and the marquee illustration of just how much worse the Prog-Dem thing is in Burlington as compared to the rest of the state.

So while its an interesting exercise in political anthropology to observe some of those folks who so loathe Adrian try to deal with the fact that he’s the only one looking good in all this, the fact is Adrian is the only one looking good in all this. Period. In his recent op-ed in the Free Press on the matter, Adrian comments:

On October 5, 2009 the Burlington City Council and the residents of Burlington learned for the first time the magnitude of the problems facing BT and just how much had been done in their name in their name to BT over the past year: 

1) Burlington’s Chief Administration Officer (CAO) knew as early as August, 2008 that BT’s Certificate of Public Good (CPG) issued by the Public Service Board (PSB) required any monies temporarily loaned to BT from taxpayer funds and other city revenues (“pooled cash”) needed to be paid back within 60 days;

2) Mayor Kiss’s CAO withheld this information from the City Council for at least 13 months;

3) the CAO has continued to authorize, without City Council approval, millions of dollars out of the City’s “pooled cash” funds for periods longer than 60 days thereby violating the CPG and the City Charter.

[…]

Five days after filing a petition with the PSB to amend BT’s Certificate of Public Good to allow the City to lend taxpayer dollars to BT, the Kiss Administration asked for the Council’s approval retroactively. I asked that a vote on the resolution be delayed for approximately one month to give both the City Council and the public time to learn more about and better understand the impacts of allowing taxpayer monies to be used to support BT on an ongoing basis. The Mayor opposed my request and it was defeated by a wide majority.

[…] It may be that voting occurred as it did precisely because the Council has not been given the information that it needed to act and was unwilling as a body to question the Mayor’s intentions.

Hard to argue with that.

But the mystery remains as to why the rest of the City Council fell all over itself to enable Leopold (and Kiss’s) bad behavior at their own expense. Perhaps the leaked video from that very City Council meeting can shed some light on this phenomenon…