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Thursday, April 26, 2012

THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG



Relax, you have Mastercard.

That apparently seems to be the mindset around Hartford City Hall as the cash strapped City continues to spend over a million dollars a year on food, beverages and other items purchased on City credit cards and paid for by the taxpayers of Hartford.

Yesterday's posting pointed out a few purchases by one person, the principal at Kinsella Magnet School, but it doesn't appear as though she is the only one.

There is still a lot of digging to do as I go through each cardholders purchases, but if you have the time, take a look and feel free to e-mail any thoughts or questions you may have.

The list may not be entirely complete, for example the Mayor's Chief of Staff Jared Kupiec's card only shows a few weeks of purchases, which is only a partial report for some reason, even though I requested the full report.

It looks like Best Buy as well as a couple of downtown food and liquor establishments are being kept in business by the city credit cards.

FOI Hartford Card Holder Transactions 1 (5)

8 comments:

Bruce Rubenstein said...

If the employees at city hall like the mayor's chief of staff and Mr Panagore are using the charge cards for alot of booze and food are they alos hitting the 3rd floor gym to slim down?

Bruce Rubenstein said...

I have long believed that until you change the political structure of Hartford, you will always get a new Mayor and his/her team come in and do the same things as a previous Hartford Mayor and team did.And that is pretty much what we have here.There is but a dime's worth of difference to me between Perez and his team and Segarra's...it is a distinction without a difference when both Perez sit as Mayor,BOE and the building committee and both have avoricious team members spending and using the city charge cards like it was their own personal ATM.It is all part of their warped view of "shared sacrifice". To them, shared sacrifice means that the citizen "share" more in taxes so that the city hall minions can receive a bonus,pay increase or unsupervised charge cards to enable the employee to charge away on the tax payers dime.

The long suffering tax payers will continue to suffer another tax increase to fund these activities because the Mayor and his cronies want to extract ever more money to award their cronies.It would happen with most any other Mayor as this is the way the world works until the structure changes.

Anonymous said...

Have you turned these over to the State's attorney yet? They are raping our city.

Anonymous said...

I think the city should get a private jet...it'd be cheaper than paying out for all these plane tickets, no?

Howz 'bout doing all the catering from one of the culinary programs at schools...give the kids some real-life experience?

Why can't the BoE meet in a place that has enough seats, so they don't have to rent chairs?

I want to buy some stock options in Dunkin' Donuts.

Anonymous said...

This is the tip of the iceberg as to what goes on within Hartford Public Schools. You can be sure that the principal of Kinsella will not have any consequences. Better yet, she will most likely be promoted. The common saying in HPS is "screw up and move up".

Too bad you can get away with this behavior in urban districts because suburban districts wouldn't tolerate this. Very sad - Hartford needs strong leadership and it certainly doesn't have it!

Yolanda said...

Like every other work place there is ONE department that is responsible for any request with concern to company spending. Why are these folks allowed to have city credit cards when they can just put in a request for "petty cash"? I bet the spending would drop immediately if they had to ask for exactly what they wanted and someone else cuts a check AFTER the money request is accepted. There should be someone in that one department monitoring where all that money goes every month.

Anonymous said...

Kevin, Please
FOI the disbursements of $3,000-5,000 plus per client, Panagore's Grants management pays the University of Hartford to create facebook page for businesses on the Av. and Ms M R I cry salary.

KEVIN BROOKMAN said...

Anonymous 8:06pm,

If possible please e-mail me with details, I'm not sure exactly what you are asking me to request through FOI, or if you prefer post it anonymously here and I will keep the message private rather than allowing it to be posted