Oh, I forgot to add that the union man’s lover was a transvestite. And, like a transvestite, Krolicki may not be what he appears to be.

The Brian Krolicki saga reminds me of a scene from “Last Exit to Brooklyn”. A small-time union organizer has been spending union funds on an expensive affair with a new lover. Eventually, his boss catches on to the situation. To defend himself, the spendthrift Casanova holds up a mass of papers and says, “But I’ve got receipts for everything!”

It’s true there’s no money missing from the College Savings Program, but that isn’t the issue.

Suppose you’re an assistant manager at the DMV. One day, you notice that office supplies are running low, so you tell the clerks to hold on to any cash they take in. Once there’s enough, you head to the office supply store and buy four times as many pens as the division’s budget allows. Then you buy the correct amount of printer paper, but pay nearly twice as much as you’re supposed to. Do you think your boss will be very understanding when you get back to the office?

I think that’s a reasonable analogy to the Krolicki situation. According to the state’s audit report, state money was not deposited into the state Treasury as required by law; instead, the Program Manager was told how to disperse the funds by the Treasurer’s office, bypassing the state’s accounting system. In a two-year period (2005-6), the Program’s advertising budget (set by the Legislature) was supposed to be $370,000; that budget was exceeded by more than $1.3 million. (Many of the resulting ads prominently featured Krolicki’s smiling face.) Earlier, in 2002, a law firm had been paid $428 an hour instead of the $225 contract rate, resulting in almost $96,000 in excess payments.

Instead of rallying around Krolicki, small-government conservatives ought to be asking themselves, “Is he really one of us?”

I am still trying to figure out how being a Republican has anything to do with this issue. I am a registered Republican and I am plenty mad that ANY person in an elected office does not do right by the electorate. You just don’t get it…there is no difference between the two major politcal parties.

Thank you Judge Adair (you are now 2-0 in your support of Krolicki), for doing away with the need for a jury trial!

Who knew that the finding of fact actually has resided with the judge and not the jury all these centuries?!

Republicans whine and scream all the time over “government waste”, but how is it that they never complain when one of their own spends our tax dollars on his political campaign? The irony never ceases to amaze me.