Thursday, March 5, 2009

Coming home to roost

I'm watching with great interest as the District XI Agency on Aging and its Executive Director Don Medd threaten to move out of downtown Youngstown (http://www.business-journal.com/ , http://www.vindy.com/news/2009/mar/04/agency-on-aging-considers-moving/). It's especially interesting to see that the rumored new home of the Agency will be the Eastwood Mall owned by the Cafaro company.
I have seen the Agency on Aging and Mr. Medd up close. I worked there for seven and a half years investigating complaints regarding nursing homes and long term care providers in a four county area. I also tried, over a decade ago, to alert people to financial conflicts of interest between Mr. Medd and some of his Board members. Specifically, Medd was renting a house owned by the then President of the Board of Trustees. Also, at that time he hired another then current Board member who was an attorney to represent him in his divorce.
This incestuous relationship between Board of Trustee members and the Executive Director they were supposed to supervise led to chaos at the Agency on Aging. Medd was often out of the office for entire days. In his absence, I saw Agency on Aging employees sitting crosslegged on the floor "shooting the breeze" for entire afternoons.
So the conflicts of interest led to a lack of supervison of the Executive Director which led to the Executive Director not perfoming his required oversight of employees which led to employees being paid with tax money to sit around and do nothing.
Now, in the words of last year's famous phrase from Jeremiah Wright, "the chickens are coming home to roost". Medd has upset Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams with his threat to yank 70 employees (and their tax revenue) out of downtown and out of the county. I don't think it's dawned on Mr. Medd yet, but he may have just "gone off the reservation" (one of his favorite former phrases).
As long as Medd sat silently in his office and let the Agency on Aging remain virtually unknown in the community (despite handling tens of millions of taxpayer dollars), he could drift toward retirement and collect his annual $80,000+ per year in salary. Unfortunately, he has become a public figure now. It's about time.

6 comments:

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