Now wouldn’t you know it — everyone is busy busy looking through the remains of the old bridge, now fished out of the river, to try and find out why it collapsed, and what do you think they found? Well a perhaps minor league Republican Sex Scandal. This one Hetro.
It is breaking like this. Yesterday, Sonia Kay Pitt, the MN-DOT Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management since 2003, got fired. It seems she was taking unauthorized trips — some to emergency management training sessions around the country at State Expense, and was spending an inordinate amount of State Money on Cell Phone calls to the US-DOT emergency services manager (a political appointment) in DC, when he was on the road, and they were planning to meet at conferences.
This came to the attention of the Legislative Auditor when a review of MN-DOT personnel and their expenses was done with regard to all things 35 W — and it seems that Ms. Pitt did not return to Minnesota when the bridge collapsed (something of an emergency that needed managing by her agency) — but instead she was first in DC with Daniel Ferezan, then she went to the approved conference at the Kennedy School at Harvard – arriving just as the bridge went down – and instead of returning home, she went back to DC and spent a week with Daniel, at times even being waived in by him to the secured areas in the Dept. of Transportation.
The local paper which was bought out in recent months by What seems to be right wing private equity, (we really don’t know the true owners,) finally did a good deed, and did a little investigative work, and found that the State of Minnesota expense for having our Sonia picked up for her flight back to Minnesota 13 days after the Bridge Collapse, was an order to pick her up at Daniel Ferezan’s residence. Aah, Ha, The Little Blue Dress has been found…
Daniel M. Ferezan, the Federal Highway Administration’s program manager for transportation security, has been questioned by a private investigator hired by MnDOT, said Ian Grossman, the top spokesman for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. The investigator probed Pitt’s whereabouts and her activities with Ferezan in the frenetic aftermath of the Aug. 1 collapse, Grossman said.
A source with direct knowledge of the investigation said that MnDOT was investigating whether Pitt traveled under false pretenses.
The same source said investigators were looking at whether Ferezan enabled her to make trips that weren’t appropriate for her job. In some cases, Ferezan reportedly helped get Pitt designated as a federal liaison, which provided her cover for travel, the source said.
| corruption | |
| noun | |
| 1. | lack of integrity or honesty (especially susceptibility to bribery); use of a position of trust for dishonest gain |
It’s fine about Sonia and Daniel having an affair. Good for them. Government service can be pretty boring. Doing it on company time with company money – not so good. But she pushed the envelope about as far as it can be pushed – by not showing up to Minnesota’s only disaster in known history in order to spend the week with her consort. It’s way too easy to make "Brownie" jokes. What’s harder is to swallow is that Homeland Security is looking like a very expensive "boondoggle." And what’s with the "Federal Highway Administration’s program manager for transportation security" being part of her laying out of work?
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