Denver Post: Scammers steal $850K in construction money from Boulder Valley School District
The Boulder Valley School District has added safeguards after a scammer stole about $850,000 of bond construction money using knowledge of public contracts and a forged signature.
The theft, which happened about a year ago, came to the district’s attention when contractor Adolfson and Peterson Construction asked for a payment on a past due account, even though the district had been sending payments.
The work was part of the district’s $576 million bond issue, approved by voters in 2014.
The scam started when the district’s accounts payable department received a call from someone claiming to be with Adolfson and Peterson asking to change the way the company was paid, according to the police report.
The Daily Camera editorial: A rigged county bid process
Members of the Boulder Democratic Party who support principles of good government should be deeply troubled by a sham bidding process the county commission is engineering in order to hire its preferred vendor to conduct an agricultural study on county-owned land.
Results of an open-records request by Kraft Public Affairs, which represents a group of local farmers, reveal a trail of communications dating to last summer between the commissioners and Rodale Institute, a Pennsylvania nonprofit, “envisioning” a partnership long before any request for proposals was issued by the county.
Commissioners Elise Jones and Deb Gardner acknowledged this plan repeatedly, in public, before apparently realizing that county purchasing rules required a competitive bidding process for the multimillion-dollar study of what comes after a ban on genetically-modified organisms goes into effect. Jones and Gardner repeatedly telegraphed their desire to partner with Rodale during the 2016 election campaign, months before the RFP for a “Sustainable Agriculture Research and Innovation Initiative” (SARII) was issued. (We like to imagine that someone in county government with a sense of humor made the acronym a homonym for “Sorry” on purpose.)
Advocates for legalized recreational marijuana sales in Colorado Springs are setting their sights on a 2018 ballot proposal, since the chances of getting on El Paso County’s November ballot are slim.
A set of proposed stormwater fees sidelined any pot proposal for this year. And while most City Council members have said they want voters to decide on recreational marijuana sales, many say this year is too soon.
But Citizens for Safer Neighborhoods is prepared to petition the issue onto the county’s ballot in November 2018, said spokesman Mike Elliott. The group would need to collect about 20,000 voter signatures by next August.
from Watchdog.org
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