posted on: Wednesday, March 29, 2006

The story of Project Homestead continues to play out with plots and subplots worthy of a TV drama. In an earlier blog (March 22, 2006), we wrote about Homestead’s collapse and the inability of the DA to find anything expressly illegal amidst a sea of unethical behavior (“sea” is appropriate, since the ED and others of the organization had taken numerous Caribbean cruises on the nonprofit’s tab, an odd expenditure for a nonprofit low-income housing builder in Greensboro, North Carolina).

Now bobbing up in the water is word of a report on Project Homestead prepared by the State Bureau of Investigation, the North Carolina equivalent of the FBI, which was the basis of the DA’s conclusion that nothing was worth prosecuting. As Greensboro News & Record columnist Edward Cone points out (“Give Us All the Facts on Project Homestead”, News & Record, March 26, 2006), the unprosecutable but unethical expenditures included not only the cruises, but purchases of jewelry and guns on the Project Homestead credit cards.

Previous news coverage of Project Homestead indicated that the city’s multi-year failure to look into Project Homestead’s dubious programs and expenditures resulted in part from the ED’s political pressures. Having committed suicide, the ED isn’t in a position to throw any more political weight around. Nonetheless, the political leadership of the city seems to be of two or more minds about digging into Homestead’s expenditures and getting restitution of the public and tax exempt funds that were so egregiously misspent.

City Council member Tom Phillips decided to question why and how the SBI report on Project Homestead could be released and made public, perhaps with redactions of city government employees’ names in the report “to protect them from possible retaliation.” Scheduled to raise the issue during the “council comments” portion of the City Council meeting, Phillips lost his chance because the “comments” section was cancelled as the meeting went too late (“Homestead: Request Will Have to Wait”, News & Record, March 23, 2006). What, were they going to miss the NCAA regionals? The newest episode of “The Sopranos” on HBO? What Simon Cowell might say about the contestants on “American Idol”?

Whatever, the next installment in the saga of getting to the unprosecutable but unethical saga of Project Homestead might happen at the next Council meeting scheduled for April 4th. And then again, it might not.