Godfrey-Examiner Furnishes Mayor Godfrey His Own Personal Guest Commentary Soapbox

Two items: Another puerile and mendacious Boss Godfrey rant; and a link to the agreement which Godfrey negotiated and executed behind everyones' backs

There's more blowback regarding Boss Godfrey's Tuesday city council session meltdown. The Godfrey-Examiner furnishes Mayor Godfrey his own personal guest commentary soapbox this morning, with an accusation-filled and low-grade screed we swear will make our gentle readers' eyes bleed:

• Garcia playing both sides of the Marshall White Center issue

We're not going to delve deeply into the issues here this morning however. It's merely the one-sided "he said" portion of a he said/she said story to begin with; and besides, Godfrey's credibility is down to rock bottom, to say the very least. We will make special note however, that contrary to Godfrey's assertions, it's pretty clear from Godfrey's own statements (within this editorial and elsewhere) that the Godfrey Administration did keep both council leadership and the Emerald City community out of the formal information loop, regardless of whatever information Councilman Garcia may or may not have been been privy to.

What we also know is that Garcia has repeatedly and consistently told us that he was generally onboard the OWCAP takeover "in concept," at least until Garcia believed he was being "double crossed" with the zeroing out of the Marshall White Center budget, and that he then blew the public whistle on Godfrey's devious back room negotiations, with his Standard-Examiner guest commentary of May 14, 2009.

So lets get down to what's really important, and try to ignore Boss Godfrey's latest diversionary tactics, wherein he once again tries petulantly to lay blame on somebody else for his own willful deceit. Think about it. If Boss Godfrey had truly wanted to keep the council (and the public) in the information loop, how difficult would it have been for Godfrey and his henchmen to have contemporaneously cc'd the entire council with this entire series of emails and memos? That's how competent business leaders, government officials and professional negotiators routinely conduct business with key stakeholders. Why, we ask, did the Godfrey administration (allegedly) limit these purported emails, memos and meetings to Councilman Garcia alone?

And here's an interesting nuance. Even though the cat was publicly out of the bag by May 14, Godfrey nevertheless continued to conduct his negotiations behind closed doors. Once it had become clear that the council may have been unaware of the the details involved in the negotiations, Godfrey could have easily mitigated the problem, by transmitting these documents to the entire council after the fact. For reasons unknown however, Godfrey apparently failed to to that. Moreover, he could have met with council leadership to bring them, however belatedly, up to speed. Nevertheless he didn't do that either. What about the tactic of issuing a press release, and setting up a forum for public comments? Nope; Godfrey didn't bother with that either.

Considering the factors in the preceding paragraph, we're thus ineluctably compelled to logically conclude that Godfrey was perfectly perfectly happy with the information status quo, whereby the council and the public remained completely in the dark.

And here's the most crucial point. The council continued to remain in the out of the loop even unto the point in time (late last week, as we understand it) that Godfrey signed the subject Godfrey/OWCAP agreement. And astonishingly, council members didn't even receive copies of this agreement until early this week, a full four or five days after Godfrey executed the document.

Ask yourself, folks... who's really doing the lying here? Who really kept the council and public out of the loop? The usual suspect perhaps...? You know... Emerald City's most prolific serial liar? Just a wild guess.

And while we're on the topic, we're pleased to provide a link to the above-referenced document, which we obtained yesterday from the City Recorder's office, and just uploaded to our storage site moments ago:

• Management and Lease Agreement

Check it out folks. So far as we know, this is the first opportunity to review, slice, dice and ginsu knife the document that Boss Godfrey negotiated and executed behind everyones' backs.

Have at it, O Gentle Ones.