Initial Observation of Ford Center Const. in Hands of City Offic - Tri-State News, Weather & Sports

An initial observation of the Ford Center construction process is out and in the hands of city officials on Wednesday night.

The report is five pages long and it does offer city officials some recommendations.

A firm out of St. Louis looked into several observations that were raised by David Garrett.

Garrett was a consultant to the city council, but says he offered these observations as a private citizen. His report highlighted what he thought were suspicious transactions made during the construction process of the Ford Center. 

The observation results do not agree with all of Garrett's findings. It says it appears errors did occur, but they did not appear to be intentional. 

"The public is skeptical about government anyway. They just are and errors do occur with this size of project. You're talking about a $128 million project and you had a lot of transactions going on. I think the people just want to know number one that was it reasonably assured the things went down the best it could have gone down," said John Friend, the City Council Finance Chairman.

A review by the State Board of Accounts also cleared the Ford Center financial report.  In a separate matter, the new report does recommend the city consider an audit of its accounting systems. 

Friend says he's not sure if that will happened or not. He says many of the council members are just reading over this report and deciding where to go from here.

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