The initial proposal for Jefferson County 911 called for $6800 in phone fees - including the use of the SEIU dialer and the possible need for paid callers should there not be enough volunteers. This information comes directly from the head of Forefront Organizing himself, Mike Dalton, who lists some pretty reasonable fees for the use of the dialer.
Here is the email exchange between Paul Mayer and Mike Dalton. If you add the use of the dialer, you see $3200 for the dialer, and $3600 for four dialers to make 60 hours worth of calls. There is also the clear recognition that a Vote Yes campaign is substantially different than an educational campaign. Both this email and those from the attorney Bob Sweeney are clear - they know the law. Later actions would show they simply chose to ignore the law as they crossed from education into advocacy.
Now look at the February invoice. Note the modest amount for phone calls. 40 hours for 4 stations.
Forefront Organizing FeburaryInvoice
Now here is the February supplemental. Note the wide disparity between what was charged and what was explained by Mike Dalton. The actual total was much higher, and when you break down the invoices, what you see is once again the prepayment of services that don't seem to have been rendered according to how they were invoiced.
February Supplemental Invoice
First, we see that the $52.00 an hour is upgraded to $70.00, and an additional $18.00 is added to make up for what appears to be poor invoicing a month earlier. But where did the $70/hr come from? It seems to be the price for a 10 station dialer. Add all of the stations together and you have 145 hours of dialing in February. From those 145 hours, 10 stations total, we see that a total of 1,450 hours of phone calls were supposedly made in February at the price of over $10,000.That comes to over $10,000 paid to SEIU simply for using the phone bank in St Louis. But there's a problem. Because the phone bank is in St Louis, they can't get volunteers from Jefferson County to make the trek up to SEIU, which means they have to pay for the callers as well. The second invoice for February also shows Callers invoiced at $15.00 an hour for 500 hours. That's an additional $7500 charged to Jefferson County Dispatch soley because Forefront/POWER had to use the SEIU phone dialer.
That's a grand dialer of $17,650, almost $11,000 more than agreed upon in the original emails between Mike Dalton and Paul Mayer. But did these calls even get done? 500 hours of callers, but 1,450 hours of call time leaves a lot of time paid for but not used. And in the emails, the difficulty in getting volunteers is addressed - which means they didn't come up with 950 man hours of volunteer time. And all of this paid in February - prior to the work being done. I look forward to the explanation of whether Brenda Shular or the board took any time to look at these invoices, or to check up on the work that was done.
Questions Still Left?
I think the biggest question was if was anyone paying attention at Jefferson County Dispatch, or if this project was simply freewheeling spending on political friends. It certainly was negotiated poorly, inspected not at all, and then managed with the bare minumum of oversight. No one made sure the invoices were correct, and that work was performed as agreed, which means the board was voting blindly on tens of thousands of dollars each month. From reading through the several hundred documents I have, I can tell you Forefront was perpetually missing deadlines, changing due dates, missing meetings, and at one point, had his resources tied up in the St Louis mayoral races rather than actually working on the campaign they were paid so handsomely to organize.
At the very least, this is a typical example of shoddy government. I expect a visit from the Auditor's office ought to shine enough light to embarrass those involved and hopefully show the voters just how little their money is valued. But there is another explanation. The money in the invoices was never intended to be carefully watched. This looks and smells a lot like one of those deals where those who are connected to the government purse are handed over taxpayer dollars for dubious purposes with the expectation that no one is looking.
They counted on the citizens of Jefferson County to be passive. They counted wrong.
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