![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athenaltenaWow. In my job I sometimes run across stories that make me shake my head, but this one was special.
I called the town to ask what had happened to a project since the developer has gone AWOL on us, and the town clerk explained to me that they didn't wind up going forward with it. Fairly standard story.
Then she says "Yeah, it was pretty much dead in the water as soon as the whole business with that ethics violation came up."
At that point I stopped her and asked, naturally, what ethics violation, since we hadn't heard anything about this. She then explained that the son of this developer used to be the director of the town's Housing Authority, and at the same time they were trying to get this project off the ground it came out that the son had been fined $5000 since he circumvented housing waitlists for his friends, who evicted themselves from their home, which was owned by a real estate trust they controlled, so they got to the top of the list due to an "emergency." He then had his dad buy the property and resell it at a profit to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars, which he pocketed. There was also the matter of some forgery of documents that gave veteran's housing to someone who was not actually a veteran, but a friend of the family.
At that point it became obvious why this project never went forward. Mainly that in the town's opinion they couldn't trust this guy or his dad as far as they could throw him, so this guy made the wise decision to bail on this new project.
That's not quite the craziest story we've had, but that's up there on the WTF meter. Is it any wonder our program gets a bad rep when our developers try to pull shit like this, and worse, are dumb enough to get caught?
I called the town to ask what had happened to a project since the developer has gone AWOL on us, and the town clerk explained to me that they didn't wind up going forward with it. Fairly standard story.
Then she says "Yeah, it was pretty much dead in the water as soon as the whole business with that ethics violation came up."
At that point I stopped her and asked, naturally, what ethics violation, since we hadn't heard anything about this. She then explained that the son of this developer used to be the director of the town's Housing Authority, and at the same time they were trying to get this project off the ground it came out that the son had been fined $5000 since he circumvented housing waitlists for his friends, who evicted themselves from their home, which was owned by a real estate trust they controlled, so they got to the top of the list due to an "emergency." He then had his dad buy the property and resell it at a profit to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars, which he pocketed. There was also the matter of some forgery of documents that gave veteran's housing to someone who was not actually a veteran, but a friend of the family.
At that point it became obvious why this project never went forward. Mainly that in the town's opinion they couldn't trust this guy or his dad as far as they could throw him, so this guy made the wise decision to bail on this new project.
That's not quite the craziest story we've had, but that's up there on the WTF meter. Is it any wonder our program gets a bad rep when our developers try to pull shit like this, and worse, are dumb enough to get caught?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-08-18 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-18 11:22 pm (UTC)As soon as I heard the phrase "ethics violation" I knew I was in for a good one. Nothing good in my line of work ever comes out of sentences that contain that phrase.