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Friday, April 29, 2011

The Annual Report - Ignoring the Cesspool Next to the Rose Garden

I got my annual report in the mail, just like the other two adults in my house. My first reaction was how much does it cost to put this crap out? I know the printing industry pretty well. For newsprint, it costs about $1.00 to print a 16 page broadsheet paper. That's newsprint, which is considerably cheaper than the glossy, heavy weight, coated paper used in the spine-bound publication to selectively inform us about what's going on with our tribal government. Add to that the cost of mailing, which given the weight of these reports, added to the fact they were sealed in individual flat envelopes, and I guarantee you that's not cheap, and I somehow doubt that the media rate was used. That was mailed out to probably half of the tribe (the portion that one can assume is of voting age) so that's 7,000 copies printed and mailed.
The other question I have, which was the same question I had with just about every annual report tribal government mailed out, what are they not telling me? It's all just rays of sunshine with these reports, which amount to campaigning for Michell Hicks at the tribe's expense.
Of course there's no mention of how well the tribally built, financed and funded golf course is doing. There's bragging on the improvements to the Dora Reed building, but no mention of the DSS findings that have jeopardized the childcare center's license. There's no mention of Cherokee Bottled Water, which went under, and no mention of the Cherokee One Feather, which is every tribal members' newspaper, which under the direction of what is clearly incompetent leadership, is headed the same direction. And why has it been so long (more than 10 years) since the tribe publicly released the findings of its audits?
Whether the chief wants to acknowledge this or not, we're all stakeholders in this tribe. We deserve to know the truth and the whole truth, and I'd like to remind Michell Hicks, a half truth is the same thing as a half lie. The tribal members deserve better than this.

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