The $30 Million Lie
Brent Gardner is the GSNEO board spokesperson for the property issues.
On April 16, 201,1 he told the GSNEO General Assembly that it would take 30-plus million dollars to bring all seven of our camps up to ACA standards. He stressed that figure. It was a central point of his presentation. (You can listen to Brent Gardner's speech at the April meeting announcing the plan to close 5 camps and including the $30 million lie here. If you don't want to take the time to listen to the audio, you can read a transcript here.)
However. He took the 30 million dollar figure from a chart projecting what it would cost to build seven Premier Leadership Centers. It had nothing to do with either ACA standards or deferred maintenance.
It was not an accident or a mistake on his part. He knew it. He's an insurance agent. He deals with charts and statistics and numbers every day. It was a deliberate misrepresentation.
There is a lot of information involved with the camp decision. It is very natural for us all to sort and simplify. I can understand how the financial information could be misunderstood as a "he said/ she said" kind of thing that goes like this: "The board says it will take $30 million to fix the camps, but camp supporters say it will only take two million, so which one are you going to believe?" Most rational people will believe that both "sides" are slanting mumbers in their favor and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
However, it is not that simple.
The two million dollar estimate is NOT from camp supporters. It comes from the council office. It is on page 17 of the Vision 2012 report available on the GSNEO website. The report was reviewed by the board property committee - including Brent Gardner- before it was presented & published.
I have never heard or read any camp supporters make an independent guess at the overall cost of camp repairs. Friends of Crowell Hilaka was not able to find any detailed estimates at all on any of the work needed at our camp. That is why we offered to pay for a civil engineer to evaluate one of the more expensive projects and provide council with a list of options and estimates. We knew that the fee for getting these estimates would run into several thousand dollars. We had the money, and we felt that it was worth paying for accurate and expert information before moving forward. The board rejected our offer, and we have since spent our money on legal consultation.
Please be clear: The council says it costs two million to resolve deferred maintence issues at all seven camps. Brent Gardner chose to take an unrelated, unrealistic, fantasy figure for unwarrented construction and claim that this was the basis for our need to sell camps.
In spite of several email messages about this, Gardner never corrected himself. In August of 2011, he gave an interview to WKSU in which he still claimed it'll cost $30 million to repair the camps.
Then, on December 28, in a letter to the editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, board president Joan Villareal comes up with two different figures: $7 million in deferred maintenance; $18.8 million to get to ACA standards. But where do these numbers come from? Why haven't we heard them before?
On April 16, 201,1 he told the GSNEO General Assembly that it would take 30-plus million dollars to bring all seven of our camps up to ACA standards. He stressed that figure. It was a central point of his presentation. (You can listen to Brent Gardner's speech at the April meeting announcing the plan to close 5 camps and including the $30 million lie here. If you don't want to take the time to listen to the audio, you can read a transcript here.)
However. He took the 30 million dollar figure from a chart projecting what it would cost to build seven Premier Leadership Centers. It had nothing to do with either ACA standards or deferred maintenance.
It was not an accident or a mistake on his part. He knew it. He's an insurance agent. He deals with charts and statistics and numbers every day. It was a deliberate misrepresentation.
There is a lot of information involved with the camp decision. It is very natural for us all to sort and simplify. I can understand how the financial information could be misunderstood as a "he said/ she said" kind of thing that goes like this: "The board says it will take $30 million to fix the camps, but camp supporters say it will only take two million, so which one are you going to believe?" Most rational people will believe that both "sides" are slanting mumbers in their favor and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
However, it is not that simple.
The two million dollar estimate is NOT from camp supporters. It comes from the council office. It is on page 17 of the Vision 2012 report available on the GSNEO website. The report was reviewed by the board property committee - including Brent Gardner- before it was presented & published.
I have never heard or read any camp supporters make an independent guess at the overall cost of camp repairs. Friends of Crowell Hilaka was not able to find any detailed estimates at all on any of the work needed at our camp. That is why we offered to pay for a civil engineer to evaluate one of the more expensive projects and provide council with a list of options and estimates. We knew that the fee for getting these estimates would run into several thousand dollars. We had the money, and we felt that it was worth paying for accurate and expert information before moving forward. The board rejected our offer, and we have since spent our money on legal consultation.
Please be clear: The council says it costs two million to resolve deferred maintence issues at all seven camps. Brent Gardner chose to take an unrelated, unrealistic, fantasy figure for unwarrented construction and claim that this was the basis for our need to sell camps.
In spite of several email messages about this, Gardner never corrected himself. In August of 2011, he gave an interview to WKSU in which he still claimed it'll cost $30 million to repair the camps.
Then, on December 28, in a letter to the editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, board president Joan Villareal comes up with two different figures: $7 million in deferred maintenance; $18.8 million to get to ACA standards. But where do these numbers come from? Why haven't we heard them before?
