Stimulus Waste Panel Cancels Ritz-Carlton Meeting
By Louise Radnofsky
A panel advising the independent agency charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the stimulus plan announced Friday night that it had pulled the plug on a public meeting which was to have taken place at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Washington Examiner reported on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel's hotel choice Thursday, calling it a "super-luxe" destination and quoting the hotel website's boasts of a "picturesque" location, nearby shopping and golf facilities and the "casual elegance, relaxed atmosphere and uniquely inviting ambiance" of its restaurant.
The newspaper also encouraged readers to write to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board about the meeting, which was announced in the federal register earlier this week and was scheduled to take place on November 22.
By Friday the board sent out a press release saying that the Ritz-Carlton was the best-value choice of three hotels considered in Phoenix but that the panel's chair, Chris Sale, had decided to postpone the event "in deference to concerns raised in the press" about the choice.
Ms. Sale said that the hotel had offered the four-member panel a government room rate of $109-a-night, but that the meeting would still be rescheduled "at a less controversial location."
The board said that it did not immediately have further information, including the other hotels considered, or the cost of the renting a space for the meeting in the hotel.
It was also not clear if the board had received complaints about the decision to hold a meeting in Arizona, which some cities and private companies are boycotting in protest of a state immigration law requiring local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status ofeveryone they suspect as being an illegal immigrant. The Obama administration has filed a lawsuit against the state law, arguing that it intrudes upon areas that are left for the federal government.
According to the notice in the federal register, the stimulus meeting was supposed to have been for members of the public to comment on their experience of using the recovery.gov website and on ways the board could prevent waste, fraud and abuse and provide more information about the aid and tax cut provisions in the stimulus package.
Ms Sale was previously a chief financial officer of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and a chief operating officer of the Small Business Administration. The other three members of the panel are Steven Koch, a vice chairman and co-chairman of Credit Suisse's Mergers and Acquisitions Group, Malcolm Sparrow, a professor of the practice of public management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Edward Tufte, the graphic design expert who recently produced a pro-bono map for recovery.gov.
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