No regrets about Real News and Honest Journalism

A small thread on Facebook became the appropriate, if not perfect, place and opportunity to remind you all that The Amarillo Independent survived for six years but never thrived because the conservative business majority wouldn’t support it. Those few who did bless us with advertising recognized that the progressive editorials and opinions were well-walled off from the journalism, which we practiced with unparalleled integrity. I

look back and realize that the best advice I got and biggest regret I have over lot listening to it was from Claudia Stravato, who told me to run the Indy as a 501(c)3 nonprofit — that the old news business model was dying. She was right.

But that aside, and I know I am harping on this, the Indy’s stories and warnings about Wallace Bajjali were right and had the decision-makers here listened, well … .

The Wallace Bajjali stories weren’t the only investigative pieces that broke ground in this vast journalistic wasteland. We exposed Baptist St. Anthony's Health System’s lack of true charity care. When the Texas Medical Board took action on local physicians, we reported it, including a more in-depth look at why Dr. Roby Mitchell lost his license. We also exposed Amarillo ISD’s unfair treatment of the LGBT community; we exposed the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce for shilling an inferior health insurance plan to its members and, in another story, how the city almost shut down the chamber’s big barbeque event because of food handling problems.

I don’t regret a moment of the six years I worked so hard to practice a craft with passion and to give the community an outlet that truly represented “Real News, Honest Journalism.” And I don’t regret for a minute that I shut it down so my wife and I were no longer shackled to the City Council’s meeting schedule and the (in this case, I am proud to use the word) newspaper’s production timetable. Sometimes I wish I’d been more civil along the way, but in my heart I believe journalism was a higher a calling than the Episcopal priesthood, which I decided to not pursue.

Remember that a free press built and sustain the United States’ form of democracy and freedom and it’s as important locally as it is nationally.

Double standards for Wallace Bajjali supporters

From what I can tell by seeing reactions to the Amarillo Globe-News stories posted to Facebook as well as other Facebook posts, the allies of the Wallace Bajjali-Downtown Amarillo Inc. plan for a ballpark are in panic mode. These people are running scared because the voters dared to turn out in the past municipal election to vote against the entrenched “leaders” of the city. Those are the same leaders who gave us an insider’s plan for making money on a downtown development plan flawed from the start. And, if it succeeds, is sure to put money in the pockets of prominent lawyers, a former mayor’s husband and others who have insider and advance knowledge.

It’s my observation that all this social media activity is an attempt to mischaracterize this recent election and nullify the results by insulting the new councilors, Randy Burkett, Mark Nair and Elisha Demerson. I noted the most recent attacks in a previous blog post. The direct attack came in the story attacking Burkett and Nair on their interactions with the group of some 20 or so millennials who claim to represent the 43,000 millennials in Amarillo.

Here is how Laura Street tried to discount the results of the recent election, according to a Globe-News quote, “They feel they have the mandate of the public, but only 15 percent of registered voters voted.”

Two years ago, then-incumbents were re-elected with a lower voter turnout than we had in 2015 and they claimed a mandate to continue with the downtown development plan, even though some of them knew then that master developer Wallace Bajjali was in trouble in Joplin, Mo., and had missed deadlines in Amarillo. When Wallace Bajjali cratered in January 2015, the incompetence of the City Council, DAI and others became part of the election calculus. It was not just the city’s operation problems that led to the defeat of two incumbents and the defeat of an “establishment” candidate for the open seat. The egregious examples of the lack of diligence were very clear to the voters who wanted things fixed, changed and done so transparently.

Street and her Wallace Bajjali-loving allies need to explain how they can now claim the election with a better voter participation is less legitimate than the one before with a lower turnout. And they need to do it in context and honestly.

Report: David Wallace claims Amarillo one of 413 creditors

A newly published report in the Sugar Land Sun lists some of David Wallace's creditors and that the former master developer has filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy.Read the full report here.

Joplin takes Wallace-Bajjali-gate to heart, Amarillo doesn't

KOAM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Joplin, Mo., has been on top of the Wallace Bajjali story from the start of that city's attempts to recover from a devastating tornado that struck in 2011.

Unlike Amarillo, that city's manager in Joplin is taking the Wallace Bajjali debacle to heart. Here is a story from that KOAM's newscast that provides a stark contrast to the stonewalling from our city's council and manager.


KOAM TV 7

ABC 7/KVII will feature questionable downtown deal

ABC 7/KVII will feature questionable downtown deal

ABC 7/KVII will feature questionable downtown deal

ABC 7/KVII will feature questionable downtown deal

ABC 7/KVII will feature questionable downtown deal

Wallace Bajjali audit target in Joplin - Special council meeting there tonight - UPDATE

By Sarah Okeson

For The Amarillo Independent

The state auditor for Missouri is examining the relationship between Joplin, the Missouri city devastated by a 2011 tornado, and Wallace Bajjali Development Partners,  the firm both Joplin and Amarillo have turned to as master developer. Contracts between the Sugar Land, Texas-based firm and each city came despite the firm’s history of legal problems.

“I can confirm that we are conducting an audit of the city of Joplin and that we have looked at the relationship between the city and Wallace Bajjali,” Spence Jackson, a spokesman for the Missouri state auditor said in an email to The Amarillo Independent.

Jackson would not comment on whether the auditor has subpoenaed anyone from Wallace Bajjali in its investigation.

Joplin hired the firm to help redevelop the city after the May 22, 2011 tornado, but the company moved out of the space it had leased in a historic downtown Joplin building about a week ago, according to a property manager.

“They had told us a few months before that they were going to be moving closer to the project site,” said Ginger Sweet, the project manager.

She would not comment on whether the firm owed back rent. The phone in the company’s main office in Sugar Land, Texas, has been disconnected. Company officials did not respond to a message left on their website.

The Joplin City Council has scheduled a special meeting for 5:45 p.m. Monday to talk about legal action or litigation.

Lynn Onstot, a spokeswoman for Joplin, said she expected the City Council will talk about Wallace Bajjali. “I’m sure there will be options discussed,” Onstot said. “I’m not sure if a decision will be made.”

Joplin Mayor Mike Seibert would not comment to the Independent about Wallace Bajjali.

“The city does not have legal confirmation of the status of WB,” he emailed the Independent this morning.

Wallace Bajjali and three of its limited partnerships were ordered to pay $1.2 million in 2012 to settle a federal case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Wallace Bajjali didn’t admit to any wrongdoing in the case.

Red LIghts Redux - It's About the Money

There is a long-standing rule in journalism: Follow the money. In this case, the Dallas Morning News notes that the Denton Record-Chronicle and Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported problems with red light cameras in several cities, including findings from Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute. The bottom-line is that these Orwellian enforcement tools don’t necessarily make roads safer. They change the type of accidents and make cities richer.

In other words, the selling point that closes the sale is greed, for both the companies selling the technology and the cities buying it. Safety, like “national security,” is just one more shibboleth for the governing class to find a way to raise money. Amarillo’ City Council has been adept at this during the last few years. The five-member walk-in-lock-step cabal approved the red light cameras and then expanded the use despite the Texas A&M University Transportation Institute findings. And, they accepted misrepresentations of hearings by the chairwoman of the city’s Transportation Commission on the cell phone ordinance.

Arlington is facing a petition drive that may be successful in killing off the cameras. Other cities, Houston, Lubbock and College Station have already banned them. The odds aren’t good in Amarillo for such action because the City Council made it more difficult to place things on a ballot. Of course, the council did so with the predictable help from those who didn’t bother to understand and voted their own interests.

It is one more case of getting the government we deserve.

The Globe-News is hypocritical and the City Council cowards

I’ve been a journalist for almost 20 years and in all that time I’ve never seen a community in which the newspaper of record was such a lapdog and so unwilling to do the real job of the Fourth Estate. It borders on journalistic malfeasance.

The City Council is on the verge of signing contracts for construction of a downtown convention center hotel and a parking garage with its master developer, Wallace Bajjali Development Partners. The councilors, led by Mayor Stiff Hair in all his arrogance, popped the plans on the community this past Wednesday. The one and only public meeting was last Thursday. The council and its cohorts have skulked behind the public’s back since 2010 and now, in less than a week, councilors plan to adopt contracts that break a string of promises to the taxpayers, citizens and voters of Amarillo.

The City Council told the public that no taxpayer money would be involved in this public-private partnership and that Wallace Bajjali would bring the $113 million miracle to fruition by Nov. 1, 2013. In fact, I sat in City Council meetings in which the publisher of the Amarillo Globe-News, Les Simpson, who was at the time chairman of the Downtown Amarillo Inc. board, said these developers would have “skin in the game.”

And that miracle would be the 300-room convention center hotel, a parking garage and a glorified baseball park that the leadership of this unfolding debacle called a multi-purpose event center. We now know that Wallace Bajjali promises for exotic financing to make the project fly were as false as its promises in Kingswood and Joplin.

The Nov. 1, 2013 deadline came and went and the City Council didn’t have the guts to call the game for what it was — a predictable failure from fourth-rate developer backed by a fifth-rate media outlet that blasphemes when it calls itself a newspaper. Instead, the council finessed the contract. The planning continued, with DAI, the Amarillo Local Government Corp. and City Council hiding behind “executive sessions” and never really leveling with the public about all the problems that have now come to light.

So, here we are, another attempt by the City Council to stuff something down our throats at the last minute — and likely this time to succeed. The hotel size has been reduced, the hotel developer, Newcrest, is the same one who successfully turned the Fisk Building into a Courtyard by Marriott. Anyone who believes this hotel deal needed Wallace Bajjali’s help clearly doesn’t understand Newcrest doesn’t need anyone’s help. In fact, a few years ago, there were rumors that DAI's executive director, Melissa Dailey, actively opposed the Fisk Building conversion to a hotel. How’s that for irony?

The upshot at this point is the city — that is us, folks — will own all this. The “all this” now excludes the much-vaunted ballpark — Melissa Dailey Stadium at Taxpayer Field — thereby repudiating the three-legged stool the City Council promised us.

Throughout all this time, the Amarillo Globe-News had the inside track to let the public know what was really unfolding in those official secret meetings — and who knows whether there were unofficial secret meetings. Remember, the paper’s publisher was not only on the DAI board; he was also on the LGC. Any journalist worth his salt would have made sure the public would learn about the public’s business. We now know that no journalist on the Globe-News staff worth his or her salt was allowed to do the real job of a reporter. And the Globe-News publisher, swimming in the sewerage of conflict of interest, proved the importance of his journalism degree from the University of Georgia was lost on him.

Now, suddenly, the Amarillo Globe-News is all concerned about the public’s right to know. In an editorialtoday (November 9, 2014), the Amarillo Globe-News has the unmitigated gall to write, “The city needs to allow residents time to understand and research the decisions and agreements that will be the foundation of what Amarillo will be for many years to come.”

The City Council, Downtown Amarillo Inc. and the Amarillo Local Government Corp. flew under the Amarillo Globe-News radar for at least four years, if not longer. All the time, the so-called newspaper did nothing and now at the 11^th Hour calls for transparency. All I can think of at this point to ask the Amarillo Globe-News that same question that Joseph Nye Welch, the United States Army’s counsel during the Sen. Joseph McCarthy(R-Wisc.) communist witch hunt, asked McCarthy.

“You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Is the city of Amarillo being honest about fixing animal control?

The city of Amarillo and its city councilors continue to assure the public that all is well and the city is making great progress on cleaning up problems what was formerly called the Animal Control Department.

But that isn’t true, according to two former officers at that department. Those officers spoke exclusively to ProNews 7 and, in a report that aired at 10 p.m. Oct. 30, these former city workers discounted the city management’s contention that things are better. Niki Niimi and Brittainy Hall did something rare in Amarillo. They bravely came forward to and spoke out against the powerful city government.


The city knew this report was coming and at 5:39 p.m. Oct. 30 issued a press release that was the city’s attempt at a pre-emptive strike against the truths to come from ProNews 7. The extensive release tries to put lipstick on a pig; other than the two top managers being gone, the below-par employees remain. And the two top managers were, disgracefully, allowed to retire instead of being fired.

And, ProNews 7’s David Grasso-Ortega, one of ProNews 7’s investigative reporters, has promised to probe the news release further. Stay tuned.

Close enough for government work?

A few days ago, I was floating around on Facebook when I saw a logo for the Alliance Defending Freedom for Faith and Justice. This is inarguably a fundamentalist oriented Christian organization that — with cleverly vague language — advocates for its views to be pushed into our secular society.

But, what interested me about the Alliance’s logo is how it struck me as similar to the City of Amarillo’s logo. You know, the second logo after the city learned the first one proposed was plagiarized from a firm in the Middle East. You know, the logo the city chose after a contest it held during one of the city’s many rolls in the hay with the Amarillo Globe-News.

So, tell me, folks, it the “A” too close for comfort?