Unlike places like Chicago and Detroit, where they actually prosecute misdoings by politicians and their friends, Dayton turns the other way, or quietly ushers people out the door.
Forbes just added a corruption factor to compile the list, which Dayton would have made had we been honest in prosecuting the worst offenders (I’ll mention a few at the bottom of the post):
We compiled our rankings by looking at the 150 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S., which meant those with a population of at least 378,000. We ranked those metros on nine factors: commute times, corruption, pro sports teams, Superfund sites, taxes (both income and sales), unemployment, violent crime and weather.
For this year’s ranking, we added the corruption component. We used the criminal conviction of government officials in each area over the past decade as compiled by the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice. This division of the Justice Department was created in 1976 to focus on “crimes involving abuses of the public trust by government officials.”
From the recent resignation of attorney Nicholas Gerren [2] after his hiring by the County despite his low score and past problems, to the $900,000 logo by the Congressman’s wife on a no-bid contract [3], to the purchase of the Reynolds & Reynolds HQ by the Dayton Public Schools, to the sale of the Arcade for $36K to Thomas Danis, and his public payoff of Police Chief Tyree Broomfield to resign, Dayton has a long history of seemingly corrupt but accepted behavior.
The latest attempt to raise the hotel tax for the RG Properties private ice arena [4] is only the latest example of how the process is polluted.
Well, it is recognition. Notice how many of those funky ‘lists’ the ol’ Gem City seems to find itself on? Three on the ten most abandoned cities. Three on the list of ten fastest dying. What next? Number three on the tally of most depressed? Worst dressed? Most stressed? Pretty soon, folks in Detroit will be making jokes about us. Keep up the good fight Dave. But during Pickett’s Charge, it didn’t make much difference who got the field promotion to General, and after the Titanic t-boned that giant ice cube, it didn’t much matter who got promoted to Captain………..