The Gary Screw and Bolt project? Or: The screw Gary and bolt project. You decide. Finally, it’s time to finish the mess that they started about ten years ago. During the height of the GUEA debacle, the GUEA under the direction of high school graduate Jojuana Meeks, had the bright idea to purchase a deteriorating hulk of a building: the former Gary Screw and Bolt Company building. Here was an organization that was supposed to be building or rehabilitating housing in the Emerson neighborhood. Talk about losing focus! I think they paid $200,000.00 for the property when they purchased it from the Lake County Commissioners. So for all of the years GUEA owned it, during the entire time that Karen Freeman-Wilson was their attorney, they never did one worthwhile thing with the property. To the contrary. By them owning it, they ensured that not one worthwhile thing would ever be done with the property. Had they not bought it, surely someone else would have by now. No matter what, it couldn’t have possibly been any worse. GUEA was always best at being worst. Now I know the current mayor doesn’t like to talk about her days at the helm of GUEA’s legal activities much. And when cornered, she would like to have us believe that as this organization’s chief counsel, that her involvement was only incidental. Are we to then believe that when it came to the purchase of a large property such as the Gary Screw and Bolt property was handled without attorney approval? (If it was, what the heck did they need her for in the first place?) Same goes for the now-collapsing , yet once-regal Ambassador Apartment building at 574 Monroe. (Warning: watch out for falling bricks) What did the mayor advise when Jojuana decided to lay down $150,000.00 of someone else’s money to buy this black hole? What advice did GUEA’s attorney give her? And what has been done with this property since the girls decided buy it? If doing absolutely not a thing except leave the place wide open to thieves and vagrants (those who’d dare risk their lives in the ready-to-collapse structure) counts for anything, they are right on track. Yes, there is a definite pattern to nearly everything that GUEA did. Buy it. Neglect it. Abandon it. Apparently there must have been a way for them to pull a lot of money off the front end of these transactions. Otherwise, I can’t figure out why they would have purchased any of them. (You would have to consult its attorney to find out for sure.) But back to the Gary Screw and Bolt property. So now Team Gary has decided that it is time to unload the property. So they decided to offer it out for bid. But they didn’t write the bid offering so that any interested parties could participate, they already have selected exactly who they want to buy the property. The qualifying bidder has to buy it for the specific purpose of creating a junk tire recycling facility. (I cannot imagine how this does not meet the standard for bid rigging. More on that later.) This is not the first time that one of these types of companies has descended on NWI. Surely many people will remember the East Chicago tire fire back in the ‘90s. This happened at a site that was home to another tire “recycler”. But this company really never recycled any tires. They just kept charging their customers for the fee to recycle them, and then they just stockpiled them in a big warehouse in East Chicago. And then mysteriously one day, the whole mess went ablaze. It burned for weeks and spilled oils into the ecosystem for months longer. Now I cannot say that is necessarily what this new company that is getting the royal treatment has got in mind, but I can’t say that it is not either. We’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe there will be a great Gary tire fire. Maybe this company will just leave town after they get done filling up the cavernous, hulking buildings sited on the Screw and Bolt property. Maybe they will fill the 20 acres of land with tires “waiting” to be recycled. Or maybe, they actually will recycle the tires. It’s a gamble that apparently Team Gary is willing to make on the behalf of their constituents. Let’s hope they have vetted them properly. And let’s make sure that we know exactly who is in charge of this decision. Let’s make sure we know all of the attorneys’ names that are acting on the City’s behalf as they craft this deal and move it forward. I don’t want to hear in 5 years as the skyline is filled with black smoke that, “…I was not involved with the day-to-day operations…” like we heard when making inquiries about all the malfeasances that took place at GUEA while we thought that there was a competent attorney reviewing all of its important transactions. So hopefully this is not just another plan to “screw Gary and bolt”. We don’t need any more projects like those that GUEA specialized in. The damage done by that organization to this city is immeasurable. If one could put a price tag on the damage and the costs that organization is responsible for causing our city, it would be measured in the hundreds of millions. We couldn’t afford it then, and we can afford it less now. It’s fourth and long for Team Gary. This sounds like another one of its Hail Mary passes that again lands short.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 03:11:41 +0000