Surely he knows better. But his unbridled personal ambition gets the better of him.
Integrity? Scrupulous adherence to the truth? Nah, it’s a race to the 22nd Floor, kiddeez, and apparently nothing is too sacred to distort in the quest for the prize.
So Wade Kapszukiewicz, once known as a bright, competent pol, has slunk down into the gutter and become an unapologetic liar.
Here are the worst of his prevarications.
Wade claims he balances the County’s five hundred million dollar budget “to the penny.” This is a lie on several levels. First and foremost is the simple fact that, as County Treasurer, Wade doesn’t set the County budget and has no oversight over it. That’s the job of the County Commissioners. The Treasurer is a flow-through office, meaning money simply flows through. Taxpayers pay what they owe to the Treasurer, who then allots it to other places as dictated by statute and voter-approved levies.
The only budget Wade oversees is that of his own office. The office budget is much smaller, and simpler, than the complex budget of the City of Toledo. The latter has multiple and complicated revenue streams and expenditures. Wade just has a payroll. And we doubt he directly oversees even that, given the fact that he has a bloated administrative staff that actually runs the Treasurer’s office.
The other lie about the budget is that he balances it. The County budget, and City budget, for that matter, is balanced for exactly one second. That’s when the last vote that approves it is recorded. Even at that second it is merely aspirational, composed of projections and conjecture. Before and after that, the money is flowing in from multiple sources, some restricted in use, others more generally available. Bills are paid, contracts are signed, payroll is made, appropriations are recorded.
Simply put, the money in and money out happens at a fluctuating and unpredictable pace. It is never perfectly “balanced,” let alone to the penny.
Inside Outsider?
Here’s another big lie. Wade claims he is an outsider, poised to bring an outsider’s perspective to running the City.
This from a pol who has been in elected office continuously for over two decades. He has never had a job outside politics since his twenties. He was a member of Toledo City Council in the nineties, and was vice-chair of the committee that whiffed and didn’t ensure the proper line items were created to account for the “missing $8.2 million” he continuously harps on. In other words, the dreaded commingling of funds started with lack of oversight by his own bad self.
Which brings us to another lie. No money was ever “missing.” A certain amount in the Capital Improvement Program, or CIP, had to be earmarked for use in a specific geographic area. The Hicks Hudson Administration accounted for it all along. The Bell Administration had placed it in a fund from sources they likely shouldn’t have, but that horse is out of the barn and down the road. The point is that the total of funds in the CIP was known all along, as was the amount that had to be reserved for use near the Franklin Park Mall.
To say otherwise, as Wade does again and again and again, is a flat out, pants on fire, Pinocchio-nosed, bald-faced lie.
Talking credit
Then there’s Paula HH. We wouldn’t call her crowing that $3 billion dollars in investment have flowed into the city on her watch a lie. It is true.
The only problem is that most of it had nothing to do with her Administration. Heck, much of it was planned long before she was in office. It’s not a lie. Call it a fudged misrepresentation.
Unfortunately, it’s all in a day’s work in City Politics. By the time you read this, the City primary election will be over and one or both of the fabricators will have moved on to the general election.
Let’s hope the truth moves on with them.
