Barker's cover story

Times-News Reporter Ed Pallatella fell hook, line and sinker for School Superintendent James Barker's fancy spiel about how the school district may have paid an unknown but presumably excessive amount in fees to the broker, J.P. Morgan, which managed the refinancing of $37 million in bonded indebtedness for the district back in 2003.

If Barker had couched his tale of woe in memorandum form it could have been called what is colloquially known as a CYA Memo, and I don't believe I have to spell that out.

Don't know if Barker ever heard the old saw "The buck stops here," and "here" is directly on his oversized desk. Yet he managed by inference to blame everyone but himself for the school district's loss, whatever it is, although it appears to be at least $750,000, or half of what the school board was told its profit would be from the refinancing scheme, plus whatever excess fees may have been paid to the broker, if any, plus the $60,000 the district paid to a downstate financial firm to advise it (badly, it appears) on how to handle the refinacing.

But I suspect, and I believe Barker knows the loss will be significant, or he wouldn't have gone to the lengths he did to concoct his convoluted cover story.

Then, of course, there will also be the huge but unknown prospective expense the school district's taxpayers will have to bear to litigate Barker's faux pax, thus compounding the loss, coupled with the prospect that the outcome of the litigation may be a big fat zero for the school district. There's no doubt Barker is the culprit here, but you'd never know it without reading between the lines of Pallatella's story, which provides an elaborate if convenient escape route for the superintendent.

He's the high-priced expert the board pays to guide them through financial morasses like this one. And it appears all he had to do in 2003 was insist on knowing what the refinancing fee would be, a no brainer in most business environments except, apparently, in the superintendent's suite. But instead, he allowed himself and the school board to be stiffed, assuming pending litigation shows that's what happened.

A further irony is that it took an enterprising reporter with Bloomberg News in New York City to uncover a major story in the Times-News's own backyard. Perhaps, in its defense, the local rag can invoke the NIMBY syndrome.