Annapolis Capital Punishment

Today's Capital reports that the City has filed an $8 million dollar suit against the insurance company holding the bond for the construction company renovating our police station. See the story here: http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/11_14-29/TOP. Annapolis Politics has his thoughts about it at http://www.annapolispolitics.blogspot.com/.

The mayor's reaction is colorful enough that we are both repeating her quote:

"In retrospect, I should have followed the course of previous mayors and done nothing to improve the police facility. I thought our force deserved better than the obsolete headquarters we had outgrown. No crystal ball revealed that our low bid minority contractor would deliver such an inferior product."

No, in retrospect she and her staff should have stayed on top of this thing before it went from bad to worse. Annapolis Politics likens this to her "throwing in the proverbial towel" but I think she's just incredibly exasperated at this--and a thousand other things not going her way--such as her relationship with the police chief and the ongoing problems with the Market House. However, that mess is probably more her administration's fault than is this current crisis. CP gives Mayor Moyer credit for championing the much needed renovation of our police station and encourages her to keep fighting on this one. You did the right thing to push for the renovation Madame Mayor. Of course you did not have to blame previous mayors. Just do what we need to do to get it fixed. Thank you for your efforts here--we need this done.

One possible telling thing here. CP invites you to visit the contractor's website at http://jggarcete.com/intro.html and click on "current projects". It shows our police station as having a March, 2006 completion date. Why even on their own website do they show it as a current project with a completion date of 1.5 years ago? It gets worse. They show two jobs for the National Park Service as having completion dates of 2004, a DC government completion date of 2004 and an NIH completion date of 2006. Remember--this is under "current projects". Is this just a minor matter of website updating or is it telling us something--something really bad? On the other hand, they renovated Bates Middle School and that seemed to go well. Elsewhere on their web-site it says they have a bonding capacity of $15 million. Let's hope it's enough.