Splitting hairs...Loudoun style

Suppose a group from the last election of Board of Supervisors had wanted to see a list of a sitting Board member's clients, in order to see if that Supervisor was channeling county funds and business to one of his clients?

You can already imagine the outrage by one individual in Loudoun to that, can't you? Andrea McGimsey would be beside herself, issuing FOIA requests, and rallying her troops to scream about the unfairness of it all. Nobody would be able to keep her from proving that there was not transparency in the failure by a sitting Supervisor to reveal the conflict.

Fast forward. Ms. McGimsey has now thwarted all attempts to reveal that she may, or may not, have clients who are directing her actions on the dais in order to feather her own nest , as well as direct County resources to them. In further hypocrisy, she and other members of this Board seem to think that the County Attorney only requires them to fill out a Statement of Economic Interests once a year, and that it does not need to be updated, if their employment changes.

According to her aide, members of the board do not have to disclose clients if they
have private consulting businesses. How foolish is this reasoning? Money passes hands thru client relationships as easily as it does thru employment...so where's the accountability?

We need to press our members of the Board to ask for FULL disclosure, of all clients,
all sources of income. Only when their every interest is transparent, will we truly know when we're being fleeced. This is the reasonable expectation of citizens who have entrusted them to govern the county without bias or distortion.

Of course the mainstream media has inconceivably chosen to absolutely ignore these substantive conflicts, so I charge every citizen to stop this abuse of your tax dollars, stop the stonewalling, and demand that these Supervisors adhere to the very expectations that they clearly expected from their predecessors.

The budget is much tighter, and these personal conflicts are leeching money away from schools, county funding and causing your taxes to go upward to cover the expenses that they do not want you to be able to see.

How long will you, as a county, let this fleecing occur? At what point are you prepared to stop the tax increases that are merely in place to feed special clients ....and when questioned about those clients, these Supervisors tell you it's none of your business?