Seeking Truth

SEEKING THE TRUTH – PART 1

On April 28, 2011, I began a quest to determine if the management of the Town of Lisbon was mismanaging our tax dollars.  I started with the active outstanding loans for the town.  I submitted a letter to the Town Manager, in accordance with the Maine Freedom of Access Act (FOAA), seeking the following information:  Date Approved; Original Amount; Business/Person; Loan Fund; Business Project; Balance; Date of Last Payment; and Amount of Last Payment.  The sole purpose of this information was to determine any mismanagement of our tax dollars.

Originally, the town manager ignored my request which was a violation of Maine Statute, Title 1, Chapter 13, and Statutes 409.  The town was required by Maine law to respond in writing within 5 working days which they failed to do.  I sought out a lawyer and my lawyer requested the information and was ignored by the town manager and town attorney.  At this point, my lawyer filed a lawsuit against the town for failing to provide me this information.  This was at my personal expense.  During the litigation, the two lawyers met with the judge informally several times; to save time and money, and both times the town attorney refused to provide all the information stating some of it was exempt from dissemination under the Maine Statue which makes personal and business loans information confidential.  This information was the Balance; Date of Last Payment and Amount of Last Payment.  I was seeking this information to determine if the borrower was making the payments on time or not.  The court ruled I was not entitled to this information because it could be used against the borrowers. 

However, I believe this was a stall tactic by the town in order to buy time to correct, conceal or cover-up mismanagement on the town’s part.  The town could have provided the information requested and not provided the information in question but instead needed more time to cover-up mismanagement.  When I started looking into this, I had an old document with sixteen (16) outstanding loans and this did not count the loans since 2008 like Maria’s loan.  Once I finally received the information, I was allowed to have only nine (9) outstanding loans.  Missing from the list is the $32,500.00 loaned to Atlantic Commercial Cleaners and no mention of Maria’s.  It was very clear the list had been sanitized by the town.  However, as usual the town does not do a very good job of covering up mismanagement.  There are two loans which were supposed to have been paid off in 2008 still on the outstanding loans list.  Although, they are for small amounts, why hasn’t the town management taken action to recover this money for the town?  I would say three years is probably sufficient time to correct this situation if the town was looking out for the taxpayer’s best interest.

I believe the town has written off most of these outstanding loans in order to conceal the mismanagement from the people of Lisbon.  In order to get to the truth of what is going on with these loans, I am going to request under the Maine Freedom of Access Act (FOAA), the town provide me a listing of all loans written off by the town in the past two years to determine how many taxpayer’s dollars have been lost to this program.  The information I will be asking for is:  Date of Loan; Original Amount of Loan; Business /Individual Loans issued to; Date Written Off; and finally Amount Written Off.  I can almost guarantee the town of Lisbon will NOT provide this information because the management of Lisbon does not want the citizens to know how much taxpayer’s dollars have been mismanaged.

Larry Fillmore
Concerned Citizen