EDITORIAL: Still a lie
We applaud Vice President of Development and External Relations Kathy Wilbur and Athletics Director Dave Heeke for acknowledging the Events Center $10 million scandal, but we hope no one is under the impression that their statement made the problem go away.
No one has owned up to the mistake. While it was a questionable choice in Central Michigan University's supposedly tough economic climate, we can understand why the $10 million was spent on the facility. That's not the issue.
The public remained largely unaware for three years throughout what the administration has called a transparent process.
Wilbur maintains that because it said in board of trustees documents that reserve funds would be put toward the construction, no deception has occurred and implies that critics were remiss in their questioning of the situation.
Every building uses reserve funds. The College of Medicine, the expenses of which are still being fundraised, used reserve funding.
That is not the issue. We understand that scheduling is difficult and sometimes the university will dip into its own funds to ensure processes run smoothly, as long as everything balances out in the end.
What is surprising is finding $10 million of university funds spent on a project Heeke and reams of promotional materials had called a "privately-funded" Events Center.
CMU's page dedicated to promoting the Events Center project referred it to as a full, privately-funded facility in several locations and continued to for years, despite the very same site being regularly updated in other areas.
Submitting paperwork to the state of Michigan and including notes which by themselves warrant no notice in trustees packets is not a reasonable effort to inform the populace.
CMU is not a private institution and thus its major uses of funds, particularly those which make costly changes to high-profile projects, should be thoroughly enumerated to the public.
It would be unreasonable to postulate some massive conspiracy to misuse funds throughout every part of the university involved in the project.
Instead, it seems CMU's left hand did not know what its right hand was doing, either through incompetence or deceptive exclusion.
