PLEASE, MR. IRETON: THAT’S NOT AN “ACCOMPLISHMENT”

In his latest campaign event, crudely disguised and promoted as a “state of the city” speech (which it wasn’t), Jim Ireton portrayed as a major accomplishment of his current term the City’s settlement of its lawsuit claim against several firms for badly designing and building Salisbury’s $60 Million plus new, but dysfunctional waste water treatment plant. In point of fact – never mentioned by Ireton or the Daily Times – the settlement amount was much less than 50 cents on the dollar, and a substantial part of the money was paid to the special legal counsel that the City retained because the former City Attorney could not handle the task, as well as legal fees of the latter.

As a result the City still needs many millions (and more than that so-called “surplus” of $16 Million that Ireton touts) to fix the WWTP to satisfy the state requirements. Can you guess where those bucks will come from?

This scenario may be something to brag about to like minded people in Rehobeth Beach, but not to Salisbury residents who now must pay to clean up the mess, along with the new “stormwater utility” tax that he wants to impose.

Although he isn’t responsible for the bad engineering, design and construction of the WWTP that occurred under Barrie Tilghman, who insisted on using the engineering firm, “O’Brien and Gere,” and its recommendations (for which it was paid millions by the City), Mr. Ireton is culpable for the debacle that has occurred on his watch. And he cannot take credit for the good riddance of the City officials who were involved in the design-build process for the WWTP. 

Barrie T. decided to forgo seeking reelection, in which she would have been crushed at least a soundly as her stand-in compatriot and chief cheerleader during her tenure, Gary (“on time, under budget”) Comegys. John (“GI”) Jacobs, the former City Engineer, left for supposedly greener pastures elsewhere, and then there’s the saga of the former City Attorney – who Ireton kept on the WWTP case in court despite his involvement in the contracts with the engineering firm, which put a cap on the amount that the City could recover!

Mr. Ireton, like his role models in the state and federal governments, believes that political pandering of the sort that he sponsored at Holloway Hall, liberally laced with unsupported self-serving statements such as that exposed above, will mask his real record. Don’t be deceived – yet again -- by such duplicity.