IS IT TRUE April 10, 2012

IS IT TRUE that last night after the regularly scheduled meeting of the Evansville City Council, Tim Eckels, the publisher of the City County Observer approached Debbie Dewey, the president of GAGE to inquire when she was planning to answer the questions that he had asked her via letter regarding the due diligence process that she was in charge of in the Earthcare Energy vetting period?…that much to his surprise, Mr. Eckels was verbally assaulted by Ms. Dewey and was informed that she did not have any obligation to answer questions from a blog that is not a legitimate news organization?…that she also let Mr. Eckels know in no uncertain terms that she is not obligated to answer questions from anyone but members of the Evansville City Council?…that for a person whose very job depends upon the sponsorship dollars that come from local government in an amount of over $350,000 per year she is subject to open door laws, sunshine laws, and is as much of a public servant as any other local government official?…that as a reminder the questions posed to Ms. Dewey by the CCO are as follows?

1. Did you or anyone else at GAGE conduct a credit check and a background check on Ervin Washington, Ken Haney, or Stephen Geldmacher?

2. When did you become aware that a member of the management team of Earthcare Energy specifically Erwin V. Washington, plead guilty to the charges of reporting to pilot a commercial airliner with an alcohol level that was almost 3 times the acceptable limit?

3. Did you provide Mayor Winnecke and/or the Gage Executive Committee, or entire Board of Directors with this information before recommending Earthcare Energy for a $4.8 million loan to the Evansville City Council?

4. Did you include this information in the Evansville City Council packets or make sure that all of the Evansville City Council members were aware of this fact before they voted to approve the loan on Monday March 26, 2012?

5. In your testimony before the Evansville City Council you referred to 6 or 7 loan applications made by Earthcare Energy that were declined. Did you make these rejected applications available to Mayor Winnecke, the Gage Board of Directors, and the Evansville City Council prior to the vote?

6. Do you think that information such as credit, background, and loan application history are material in making a decision with respect to a $4.8 Million loan?

IS IT TRUE that those 6 questions are very simple to answer, have relevance to the VETTING process and do not have the potential to compromise any competitive positions for the Earthcare business model?…that Ms. Dewey is free to redact any words in any documents that would compromise any deals but would be free to answer simple questions like these as she wished?…that question #1 is a simple YES or NO answer, “did you do a credit check and background check of the officers of Earthcare”?…to banks, angel networks, and venture capitalists this information is important and no one will get a loan approved without these things being answered?…that Mr. Eckels did not even ask for the credit checks or the results of any background investigations, he simply asked if they had been done?

IS IT TRUE that Ms. Dewey’s hostility and refusal to answer simple questions just feeds the suspicions that the answer to the Vetting questions are all NO?…that if Mr. Eckels had wanted to craft 60 minutes style “gotcha” questions he could have?…that the CCO continues to call for caution and for the City Council and its surrogates like GAGE to conduct their business like a bank as opposed to writing a $4.8 Million check on insufficient vetting?…that the CCO has never attacked Ms. Dewey but that we have asked legitimate questions of her that other Evansville media seems unconcerned with?…that our purpose in these questions is to help the Winnecke Administration make informed decisions as opposed to delusional decisions that lead to things like the Executive Inn dilemma, the McCurdy debacle, and the Homestead Tax Credit secret meeting all three of which were exposed for the calamities that they became by the City County Observer?

IS IT TRUE that Ms. Dewey, the GAGE Executive Committee, and by their silence the entire GAGE board of directors can maintain their position of obstructionism with pertinent facts regarding the use of public money but that obstructive position is about to be tested by virtue of FOIA requests?…that the CCO is recognized and treated as a legitimate news source by the Winnecke Administration and all City of Evansville Departments?…that the CCO has traffic of over 1 Million page views per year from over 50,000 unique readers?…that snubbing an entity that has a history of doing whatever it takes to expose poor public policy is a first punch that Ms. Dewey threw last night?…that we still just want to know the facts about GAGE’s vetting of this deal and will leave no stone unturned to find them?