Ed Pankonin, the treasurer and board member of the Southeast Volusia Advertising Authority, resigned. He and George Richford, who earlier resigned, were the two dissenting board members in action taken by the other five SVAA board members to fire Nicole Carni as director last month.
Supposedly, the letter fron Pankonin was written to Volusia County Manager Frank Bruno. The News-Journal had a story about it today. They had a reporter at the County Council meeting Thursday. I was in bed sick with bronchitis, though I did get out to an open house Thursday by the Sheriff's House in Oak Hill.
NSB News still does not have receipt of Pankonin's letter as of the 10 o-clock hour this morning. Why is that, Dave Byron, county gaterkeeper? We have asked the county for "any and all" public records related to this ongoing saga, but our requests have gone unanswered, which means we're going to have to spend money to hire a lawyer and make the administrators do their jobs.
Bruno told NSB News he was handed the letter during Thursday's meeting by a member of County Manager Jim Dinneen's staff. It's not as if the county is unaware of what we want. I even spoke to County Council members Carl Persis and Andy Kelly by phone Thursday morning prior to the council meeting, reiterating I wanted "any and all" public documents related to this case.
It's not that NSB News is incapable of reporting the news. We were first in reporting that Richford had resigned. What these county administrators fail to realize is conveniently spoonfeeding a one-sentence resignation letter to the print daily that the last of the "bad guys" are gone.
This whole ad authority situation is an ugly mess and it's not going to go away any time soon. What County Manager Jim Dinneen fails to understand is that this is 2012, an election year. People are fed up. They want to know what is going on.
The county has no right to keep NSB News waiting on a public document. We have made it abundantly clear that we want "any and all" public records in this scandal.
We want all e-mails, voice mails, text messages, letters, requests between the attorney for Carni and the county and vice versa. We want not only a list of credit card purchases, we want the individual purchases with dates and locations where items were purchased.
We want all written and verbal correspondence between elected officials and county administrators pertaining to this case. That also includes administrators assigned to the SVAA, its employees and the accountants.
The county doesn't get to choose which media outlet they think will best represent their interests. The county cannot have its cake and eat it, too. Their fingerprints are all over this situation and they have a lot of explaining to do. We can't effectively do our job without those public documents.