The giveaways continued at the latest meeting of the We$t $hore Community Chest College Board of Trustees. 

If you remember from last month's regular meeting where they settled two legally thorny issues with outgoing president Chuck Dillon for a quarter of million dollars and with fired-then-resigned dual employee Julie Van Dyke for $70,000, you know that the board is freely spending money while their enrollments are in a downward spiral, dropping about 10%.  Fortunately, your property rates are going up and the state continues to generously support their public institutions.

Of course, they won't allow the public or the principals to weigh in on any matters since the two ex-officials have been mandated to not say anything bad about the college or their policies in return for the money settlement.  For two-sided 'transparency', the college has also pledged to keep mum about any problems even though they are dedicated to open discussions of such things in their by-laws. 

Fortunately, the Ludington Torch believes more in transparency than the college and will reveal that both severance packages were constructed more to save WSCC from a couple of potentially humbling lawsuits for the college.

But the latest meeting had some more generous discretionary spending. It almost makes one think that they have a bit of a surplus, even with the dwindling amount of students and the big multimillion dollar projects they have envisioned in the near future.  The City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews) was at the WSCC Board meeting and reported the following:  

VICTORY TWP. — Scott Ward was given a $1,000 a week raise for the duration of his time in the Acting President role at West Shore Community College Monday by a board of trustees appreciative of the added work the vice president of academic services is doing. At the end of the meeting Ward committed to giving back to the community and the college up to $4,000 of the raise through donations.

The board Monday also approved hiring a firm, ACCT, at a cost of $60,000, to conduct a search for a new president. 

WSCC board chairman Jim Jensen, in recommending the temporary pay hike, said Ward has done “a tremendous amount of extra work, and has done a wonderful job for us and has not got a penny for it.”

The board’s executive committee had reviewed the raise and recommended it, Jensen said. The pay hike will be in place as long as Ward is in the acting president role and will be given retroactive to Aug. 18. Ward was named acting president of WSCC in September in the wake of former President Charles Dillon’s arrest on drunken driving charges.

In introducing the raise proposal, Jensen said he hopes an interim president will be in place by the first of the year, but he said he wasn’t ready to propose any actions in that regards.

“We are continuing to explore options,” he said.

The goal is to have a new president in place sometime between July 2015 and September 2015. 

Ward took the opportunity, while receiving a pay raise, to announce he will make donations back to the college and the community.

http://www.shorelinemedia.net/ludington_daily_news/news/local/artic...

In the COLDNews printed article, WSCC Trustee Mike Ennis (left) said that making the right choice is important for WSCC because it has a rich history of picking good presidents who stay a long time.  For the record, since its founding, the college has only chosen two replacement presidents.

One was local historian Dr. William Anderson who went on to become the State's director of the Department of  History, Arts, and Libraries and head other meaningful projects with dignity.  The other was Dr. Charles Dillon, who drove the campus SUV while super drunk between Elberta and Manistee, and then extorted a quarter mill from the college to just go away after he lacked the dignity to resign.  This was after he was a key player in the Julie Van Dyke scandals, which as  matter of record, Trustee Ennis was also.

History shows that Dr. Anderson was a good fit because he was already a part of, and cared for the area, while Dr. Dillon came into the area and had his share of controversies along the way, before showing his utter contempt for the region by using his publicly-provided SUV on a drunken joyride that could have easily ended up with him killing others, and then running off with his bounty, likely to apply for another top position at another college through the same service. 

The non-profit community college group ACCT who offers President Search Service at a flexible rate surely must make a profit on these deals.   RPA, Inc. also returned a bid of $68,500, and a third firm used for executive searches did not offer a bid.  It's a racket that will likely get a lot of applicants that have never heard of WSCC, Scottville, or stepped foot in the State of Michigan.  Does history not show that these wind up as failures?

The $1000 a week raise to Scott Ward, done retroactively to when he took over the extra responsibilities of the chief executive of the college, getting promoted from his vice president status, seems another dubious use of the people's money.  This is an expenditure of $14,000 retro dollars, which isn't part of any contract, to do a duty of any vice president-- to assume the office of president when the president is unable to perform.  

The better reward would be to consider him strongly when they choose the next president, since they say he has done a great job during this period.  Mr. Ward has pledged to give back $2000 in donations to the college's foundation and $2000 to the United Way from the free money he is given, perhaps to acknowledge he really doesn't deserve it. 

The best way to express that is the same way Ludington Fire Chief Jerry Funk did at the end of 2008, when the City of Ludington voted their officers and employees large pay raises against the wind of a surging recession hitting the area.  He refused it.  Such acts do not go unnoticed and unappreciated by the community; token donations made publicly to charities do. 

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Amazing how much this is costing the taxpayers. The $60,000 that is being spent on finding a new President should be taken out of Dillon's severance money.

A brief search through Google has ACCT doing a community college president search for Chabot College (with a comparable size enrollment to WSCC) that was expected to cost $30,000 in total back in 2011, as noted in the snippet from their meeting minutes below.  The ludicrous reason for not conducting a search without a search firm is in the last paragraph. 

The biggest reason for WSC's Board not conducting their own search is that they don't get any blowback if we get another lemon like Chuck Dillon.  The Board of Trustees continue playing dodgeball with any accountability, as they have throughout this fall and summer with Dillon and Van Dyke.

Money is no object, even if it doubles the rate of just three years ago with the same company doing the same process.

Similar searches for city managers of major cities show that they conduct such searches through firms for a lot less: 

Portland Maine in October 2014 (population:  67,000) would spend $20,000- $25,000 maximum.

Savannah Georgia in 2011 (population:  142,000)  spent exactly $26,426 on the process.

Charlottesville Virginia in 2010 (population: 43,000) spent $22,300 

Coral Gables, Florida in September 2014 (population 49,000) spent $33,000, but had a problem because the candidate chosen had issues that forced him to withdraw, because the search firm only did a cursory background check.  A retired search firm executive who originally offered to do the search for free was hired afterwards

And finally in Muskegon Michigan in 2013 (population: 39,000) they received bids to conduct a city manager search which ranged between costs of $12,500 and $24,000. 

The point is that if we consider full time students as WSCC's population, we are looking at spending $60,000 to a 'non-profit organization' for a chief executive search for a village half of the size of Scottville, when cities that are 200 times the size are hiring their search firms for less than half of that.  Once again, the board shows no concern for public money.

My take on Scott Ward's retroactive $1000/wk. raise and goodwill gesture to give a month's worth of it to two charities was quite different than Manistee News Advocate's Jim Grabowski's take (shown above, click on and magnify if you cannot read it). 

While I will admit that I have seen nothing in Ward's demeanor in person or in his responses to my FOIA requests to debate any sort of character assessment of him, I do have to argue with some of Grabowski's other arguments.

He says that everyone is aware of what has happened at the college over the last few months, and there is nothing farther from the truth.  Settlement of both the Van Dyke and Dillon problems have all been done in an incredible amount of secrecy by the college, with secret agreements, gag orders, and closed meetings galore that go against everything the bylaws of the college stand for.  The public knows very little, and the college worked to keep it that way, which is deplorable, because this is a public facility. 

Teamwork in such covert activities is often a negative, and it would have been better for the university, the students and the public if the dirty laundry was aired and taken care of, not hidden away and allowed to fester.  There will be more problems to come because of this policy.  Mr. Grabowski is an alumnus of the university (and I must admit to having a couple of summer courses there, as well as being an associate professor there for several years) and admits this with pride.  I cannot do the same with what has occurred since the Dillon driving incident.

I agree X, this situation has been far from transparent. In my opinion Mr Ward should be returning the money to the school if he has no need for it. That money comes from taxpayers and  tuition and should benefit the college not charity. This whole process has been a slap in the face to students and taxpayers. The College is giving away money like it's growing on trees with no regard to those who are paying for this fiasco.

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