Sometimes A Cigar Is Not A Cigar

New Castle County Council found out the other day that they were snookered for $150,000 for an environmental study on the Port of Wilmington that was not an environmental study. It did have vague connection to the Port though.

As reported in the News Journal:

More than a year later, the study has not been produced and council members say they feel misled because they ended up paying the firm to make a premature business pitch to potential investors — not perform an environmental assessment.

[snip]

Councilman George Smiley, co-chair of County Council’s Finance Committee, and Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick later met with Paul F. Richardson Associates and labor officials.

“I feel obligated for myself to apologize to this council and the people of New Castle County,” Smiley told County Council on Tuesday. “We looked at an environmental study as being: What is in the ground? Is it toxic? Does it have to be remediated? Can you go right in and build?”

Smiley said the so-called study ended up being “basically everything other than what we anticipated it would be.”

Tom Gordon’s reply was priceless, if priceless means shaking one’s head continuously and shouting to the heaven’s, “Praise the Lord he is gone! Praise the Lord!”

“To some degree, that did happen,” Gordon said. “I think it was just mistaken terms on the action versus the title — not to trick anybody.”

I believe over the next few months there will be quite a lot of these deals being discovered since we cleaning up the remnants of Tom Gordon — this is going to take some time. Remember when you cleaned up your dead grandfather’s house and you found his porn stash. It will be like that, but this time it’s Tom Gordon and there will be stashes hidden throughout New Castle County.