IndyStar January 6, 2008

Behind closed doors

Mayoral transition anything but smooth

Both parties apparently ran into some transition friction in the final days before Bart Peterson surrendered the mayor’s office to Greg Ballard.

Ballard this past week said Peterson wouldn’t let his people enter the 25th-floor offices. But the level of animosity between the two camps went beyond that, though not quite reaching the legendary removal of W’s from the keyboards in the White House at the end of President Bill Clinton’s administration.
John Cochran, Ballard’s transition director, said the Peterson team became less cooperative toward the end. As one example, he led a visiting reporter on a tour of a disheveled office supply room on the 25th floor that looked as if a sour grape had exploded inside it.

Several employees in the City-County Building said the shredding machine was going nonstop in the final week of Peterson’s tenure, with the remains hauled directly to waiting city trash trucks.
Justin Ohlemiller, Peterson’s former deputy chief of staff, declined to comment on the question of whether the staff destroyed documents willy-nilly. He said the outgoing administration acted “professionally.”
He offered this statement: “File cabinet after file cabinet there is full of public records. Everything they need to run city government is there.”

Greg Wilson, the city’s new director of minority business affairs, was unhappy about the situation.
“The sad thing is that they were acting like those were their documents,” Wilson said. “Those records are the citizens’ documents. Tax money paid to produce them.”

Tags:   Bart PetersonNo Comments