Renewing the Focus on Holloway

After a several month lull, the heat is again being turned on ethically-challenged Milwaukee County Board Chair Lee Holloway.

As blogged here last week, Holloway has continued his campaign of punishing his detractors and promoting his cronies.

This weekend, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Dave Umhoeffer reports:

Milwaukee County Board Chairman Lee Holloway on Friday said he was willing to do whatever it takes, including return purchase money, to clear up the controversy over a north side property that is at the heart of the ethics complaint filed against him last year.

Wow, how magnanimous of him. He's willing to return $165,000 in money he allegedly swindled from a non profit agency.

+++UPDATE+++ This is even worse than I thought. Holloway is only willing to give back the $65,000 purchase price, not the $100,000 he received in rent. Note, the ownership of the building was never transferred and OIC never did occupy the building in question.

The most serious counts in the civil ethics complaint involve Holloway's receipt in the mid- to late 1990s of $165,000 in rent and purchase payments for a commercial property from a now-defunct, publicly funded social service agency, the Opportunities Industrialization Center of Greater Milwaukee. The building never changed hands because the sale was not completed.

OIC never occupied or took title to the property at 2100 W. Atkinson Ave., and Holloway maintained it.

The Ethics Board complaint charges that he should have disclosed ownership of it on county-required economic interest forms, and had a conflict of interest when he voted on county-funded OIC social-service contracts.

Holloway said Friday he was ready to complete the legal transfer of the building to OIC's court-monitored receivers if they want it. The building is vacant and boarded up, however, and may not be attractive to the receivers.

Yet Holloway's hollow attempt at redemption was followed up with another clear fabrication:

Also Friday, Holloway described his demotion of two colleagues as routine internal business unrelated to the ethics charges he is fighting.

Holloway said he meant no punishment for Supervisors Joseph Rice and John Weishan Jr., who are leading critics of Holloway's handling of the year-old ethics case. Rice "did all right" as acting chairman of the Judiciary Committee, but "was not where I needed him to be," Holloway said, declining to elaborate.

Yeah...rigggghhhht.

Holloway is continuing to prove he knows how to manipulate a weak and ineffectual county board.

And the Journal Sentinel editorializes "No one tells a king how to rule."