World View Explosion “Superficial” Damage Costs Double, Half-A-Million In Repairs

With prodding from Supervisor Ally Miller and investigative reporting by the Arizona Daily Independent, it is now known that the cost of repairs to the Pima County facility damaged by the December 19, 2017 hydrogen balloon explosion is more than double what was previously admitted.  County Administrator Charles Huckelberry, who continues to call the damage “superficial” but now adds that it was “significant,” admitted in an August 1 memo to the Board of Supervisors that insurance claims now total $475,196.08, more than double the $200,000 figure he’d been touting for months.

The admission came because Supervisor Miller placed World View on the August 7 BOS agenda.  The cost of repairs, Huckelberry argues, “is approximately three percent of the initial building cost” of $15 million.  That number does not include the $5 million in interest expected to be paid as Pima County incurred a loan to build the World View facility.  Description of actual damages continues to be left out of his responses, and World View remains silent.  Indeed, Huckelberry’s memo reads as if it was written by a World View publicist:

[Read Huckelberry memo “Aug. 1, 2018 – Item 17B – World View” here]

Video Shows World View Explosion Sending Flames Into The Sky

 

Not addressed are the delays in reporting nor the statement of Assistant County Administrator Dutch Voorhees that the report would be “sanitized” in its “final compilation.”  The investigation team, biographies of which fill half of World Views May 21 “summary report”, completed its work in February.  World View sent its “summary report” to Pima County in May.  Memos were drafted and postponed, as ADI discovered with a Freedom of Information Act request.  See previous stories:

ADI Pressure Wins Release Of World View Balloon Explosion Investigation Report To County Supervisors Months After It Was Completed, ‘Sanitized’

World View Explosion Report – Cover-Up Questions Remain

World View Explosion Speaks For It’s Self

Pima County Residents Suggest Alternative Use For World View, Admonish Supervisors

And nowhere to be seen is the investigating team’s “more in-depth report for the internal use of World View Enterprises.”  But shouldn’t Pima County, as the landlord, have that information?  And aren’t Pima County taxpayers, who are on the hook for $20 million, entitled to know what the facts are?

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And perhaps most important, doesn’t the elected Pima County Board of Supervisors, which okayed their employee’s deal with World View, even care that they are only getting bits of information squeezed out by Supervisor Miller and by the ADI’s reporting?  And that even those bits are incomplete and misleading and contradictory – “significant” and “superficial” are not usually seen in the same sentence.

There is a new term appearing in the American lexicon:  “authoritarian democracy.”  Seems like a contradiction, but when a County Administrator, a hired gun elected by no one, can choose what information he brings to his employers – the Board of Supervisors — to vote on, be it misleading, incomplete or just plain wrong, and can attempt to bully critics into silence without being held accountable, then we understand the meaning of the words.  Like “significant but superficial,” it is Orwellian Newspeak; it is not American democracy.

World View executives will be at the Board of Supervisors August 7 meeting for Agenda Item 17B, placed on the Agenda by Supervisor Miller, who also intends to meet with them after the meeting.  It would be refreshing to see the full Board in action, holding their employee accountable and demanding answers to the questions their constituents are asking.

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