Forgot one of my favorite cars

Don't know how I forgot this vehicle, but my little Mustang, which I bought from another reporter at the Oakland Press was squeezed in between the Chevette and Pontiac Station wagon.

It had one annoying feature. Whenever the car was wet on the outside, from either a cold rain or wet snow, and if the temperature dropped while you were driving it, you might be sealed in the car by a frozen driver's door and passenger door.

That meant you might have to call someone (if you had a cell phone, which in those days was rare) or roll down the window and enlist someone to take your keys, unlock the hatchback and let you out the back.

Anyway, that was one more car that I wore out driving the beat.

Cars I have known and loved, or hated

In my newspaper career I wore out a series of cars. All American brands, by the way. Back in the late 1960s I owned two Volkswagens. One was a beetle the other a camper that my first wife and I had when we got married.

But pretty much since 1970, I've owned a succession of American cars. For sure since I moved to Michigan I have owned mostly GM cars, with a few Fords and one Chrysler sprinkled in the mix.

During my police department days in the early 1970s, my first wife and I used to buy some of our cars from a tow truck operator that I met while working at the police department. He would sell me the wrecks that no one claimed for the price of the tow and storage.

Some of them lasted several months, others we had for a long time. I remember one that I bought that had a very bad running engine until I bought a $1.50 air filter and then it ran like an Elgin (an old guy reference to a fine watch).

It was like car roulette. But at least we didn't have a car payment much of the time.

As a reporter, I drove hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand miles a month for my job.

Chasing fires and police calls would quickly tally up the miles. And newspapers have been notoriously bottom payers for mileage. Usually 15-30 cents a mile less than most other corporate or government mileage rates.

Buying and replacing cars, in my mind, was just part of the cost of doing a job I loved.

All the cars I used ended up with mileage well north of 100,000 and worth so little that most of them were donated to a local high school auto shop class. The tax deduction was worth more than the resale value.

Reporter car No. 1: A 1974 Ford Gran Torino I used while I was editor of The State News. A great car until there was icy roads and then it was merely a street ornament. I once lent the car to a reporter (Kim - the guy I recently referred to as the best feature writer I know) and warned him not to park the car on ice. An hour later, after he hoofed back to the newsroom he handed me my keys, told me where he had left my car and said it wouldn't move because it was parked on ice.

This is the same car I took on road trips with State News sports editor, Joe, in 1978 that we used to travel to several away football and basketball games (yeah, Magic). Joe and I bought beer in Madison, Wisconsin and invited several players from the MSU basketball team (Not Magic Johnson or Greg Kelser) but some names MSU alums would remember from that National Championship team to our room.

They sat around our hotel room the night before the Big 10 season ending game against Wisconsin drinking our beer. All against team rules and some were probably underage. The team had already clinched the Big 10 Championship in Minnesota the day before. Forget the journalism ethics of such a lapse in judgement.

The next day the Spartans lost that last game on a 3/4-court shot by a kid named Wes Matthews. On the way back to Michigan I told Joe that Jud Heathcote better never found out we filling half his players with beer the night before the game.

Reporter Car #2: A 1982-83 blue Ford Escort. Purchased for its good gas mileage the Ford Escort was not a bad car and gave me several years and about 116,000 miles of great service. It's only flaw was a round dent, the exact size of a headlight assembly on an International station wagon. The International station wagon rear-ended my Escort in a blinding snow storm on a freeway near Holland in the early 1980s. The situation was so treacherous we just waved at each other and continued on.

I never repaired the dent and it rusted into a perfect circle. It was given to the Oxford High School auto program.

Reporter Car #3: A 1980s Chevrolet Chevette (or shove-it, as I like to call it). This was the car that had been used by my second wife, Susan. When she got a company car - she was a police detective for the City of Pontiac police department - I got rid of the Escort and started work on wearing out the Chevette.

Although it is a GM car, one I believed that was designed to meet government mileage standards so GM could make and sell cars people really wanted, this was my least favorite car ever. It was cramped, slow and made me feel like I was driving a roller skate. When it finally went over 100,000 miles it ended up in a high school garage.

Reporter Car #4: A 1990s Ford Escort station wagon. A small, but reliable vehicle that we purchased new. It got good gas mileage, but was cramped. It was severely damaged in a side impact accident that occurred while I was on my way to work at the Flint Journal.

The person that hit me, an Oakland Press newspaper carrier, ran a stop sign and caught me broadside. I ended up in the walk-in emergency room for a bump on my head and leg. I took the rest of the day off. After it was repaired it lasted for several more years.

Reporter Car #5: A 1984 Pontiac station wagon. A nice, large car that I got as part of the divorce settlement from Susan. The wagon got decent gas mileage, but had that awful blue paint that GM and Ford suffered from that flaked off.





When I became single again in 1995 I used the wagon for work, but leased a 1995 red Chevrolet Monte Carlo for fun. We were well paid in those days. The wagon had a lot of miles on it already, but I drove it until 1999 when I got married again.

Reporter Car #6: My new wife, the one I'm still married to (yeah!), had a Dodge Shadow that was just crying out to be worn out. This was me second least favorite car (next to the Chevette) but it served me well for several years. It was also the car that ended up in a national news shot for the Buell Elementary School when I simply pulled it up on sidewalk and left it outside the school where a first grade boy had shot to death a first grade girl classmate.

Our other car was a leased Buick Century. In 2000 we bought a Chevrolet Impala for our pleasure driving and I continued to drive the Shadow until 2003 when I purchased,

Reporter Car #7, a 2003 GMC Sonoma pick-up truck. The last reporter car. The truck was handy and I used it on and off duty.

I didn't keep track, but in 30 years of reporting I had to have driven more than 200,000 chasing after stories.

A remembered investigation, brings a small smile

A small smile came over my face the other day as I drove by a local accountant’s office. Not because accountants amuse me, but I was recalling how the path of this particular accountant crossed mine several years ago.

Local government beat reporting can be tedious, but with persistence and sources it can also be very rewarding. When I listed my most memorable assignments I considered putting this story on the list, but decided it was too routine to make the list.

It was one of those stories that came about because I had become familiar with my beat and had developed good sources. There was a certain amount of good luck as well. It is always better to be lucky, than good.

At the time, Lapeer County Commissioners were supposed to submit their mileage every month for reimbursement. If they were on time, a check was cut and the mileage paid and unless, or until, someone requested the mileage records, no one would ever be the wiser.

The only exception to the pay-as-the-bills-are-submitted rule was when a Commissioner (or any county employee, for that matter) let the mileage reports stack up for more than three months. Then the bills had to come before the Commissioners for final approval.

One Commissioner, the accountant, liked getting paid one lump sum check for his mileage at the end of the year. Sort of a Christmas club account. So he would wait until December, file all his mileage forms together and look forward to a $3,000-plus mileage check just in time for shopping.

So in early December, I arrived at the Commissioners meeting and picked up my meeting packet and noticed the neatly typed and printed mileage forms, all signed by the Commissioner under the penalty of perjury.

So far, it was no big deal, although I noticed the amount was quite large, $3,300 or so.
As I took my place at the press table Lenny, a county resident, one of those great citizens who comes to every meeting (and doesn’t get paid for it like a reporter) walked up to me and asked if I had looked over the Commissioner’s expense report.

Lenny, who also served as a planning commissioner in a local township, directed my attention to the November mileage sheet. He pointed to line in the mileage report that showed the Commissioner/accountant had billed for mileage to the planning commission meeting in Lenny’s township.

“He wasn’t there,” Lenny said. “I was there for the whole meeting and he was never there.”
OK, the guy made a mistake. Big deal, he’ll get a couple bucks he didn’t deserve. But then Lenny and I started looking through all the pages and the commissioner said he had been to every monthly planning commission meeting in the township. Lenny couldn’t remember ever seeing the commissioner at a meeting.

Now, I’m curious. The meeting goes on, the commissioners gave preliminary approval to pay the mileage and my mind starts racing. Within two hours I put in Freedom of Information requests to every village and township on the commissioner’s mileage sheet for minutes of meetings that the commissioner said he attended.

Grabbing my phone, I called some of the other venues that the commissioner had charged mileage for and suddenly there were more “no shows.”

I started collecting documents and traveling through the county interviewing clerks at townships who couldn’t remember ever seeing the commissioner, even though he had billed for every meeting they had during the year.

In all, I could confirm that the commissioner overbilled the county by at least $1,200 and that’s just what I could prove in documents. Where there was doubt, I didn’t count that mileage against the commissioner. Only those trips I knew he hadn’t made were counted as overbills.

So now it was time to get things in order. Before calling the commissioner, I wanted to get some county folks on the record about mileage issues before they found out what I was working on.

So I called the County Board President and simply asked him what his reaction would be to one of the commissioners overbilling for expenses. He was definitive, if it was a mistake, they should immediately reimburse the county, if deliberate, they should resign.

With all my pre-interviews done, it was time to call the commissioner in question.
At first, he denied any overbilling or mistakes. Then when I went line-by-line, including some instances where he was supposedly at two different places at the same time and date, he asked if he could have some time to review the records and get back to me.

I told him to take the time to review it, but that I wouldn’t wait forever. He called back the next day and said, yes, he had found a few instances where he may have mistakenly billed for meetings and would reimburse the county. He continued to deny the more than 100 instances of false mileage filing that I had found for that one year.

The reason this happened, he said, was that he put all the dates of the various meetings in his computer and a program that he had developed apparently “forgot” to delete the meetings he had scheduled, but didn’t attend. I pointed out that he had signed the forms as true “under the penalty of perjury.”

At the next meeting, the commissioner withdrew his mileage request until he could do a complete audit. I’m sure Christmas was a little thin at his house that year.

My first story ran on the front page, but I had already put in a new FOIA request for mileage reports for all the commissioners and for every year that the accountant/commissioner had been on the Board.

A review of the commissioner’s previous years’ filings found more of the same, thousands of dollars of mileage not driven. Too many frankly, to be any kind of mistake.

A review of all the commissioners’ mileage reports showed that unlike county employees who were not allowed to bill for mileage from their homes to work, commissioners were billing mileage from their homes to meetings at the county building. Commissioners were already being paid $17,000 a year for a part-time job.

The commissioner/accountant steadfastly refused to resign over the mileage “mistake,” but did eventually reimburse the county. He was soundly defeated in his re-election bid a few months later, a defeat many people said was a result of my stories.

The county reviewed their mileage policies and commissioners decided they should no longer bill for mileage from their homes to the county complex, and that all mileage reports would be reviewed every month and that no mileage reports could be submitted or paid after a period of two months.

In the end, an independent investigation by a prosecutor in another county did not lead to charges, although the local prosecutor believed they should have.

All of that came from an offhand comment from a source at a boring meeting. There was nothing outstanding or difficult about this investigation. Any average reporter could have, and likely would have, done the same thing I did.

But when beat reporters are missing in action, who will do this kind of plodding work? Some will say bloggers, but what impact will that have. The oversight of local government is an important role that the newspapers have filled.

I’m trying to envision who will do this kind of work in the future. I know I’m not interested in doing it for free. And what will a politician care if some blogger calls and demands answers. Like it or not, there’s a certain impact when you tell a politician you are calling from a known media entity.

When I call from “Grandma’s Recess” blog, I don’t think the politician will be as responsive, or as worried, as my accountant/commissioner was during the mileage investigation.

So pardon me for a little smile as drove by the accountant’s office.

Oh, and thanks for great sources and citizens like Lenny.

Free at last, I'm free at last

For 30 years I've chased police cars, ambulances, fire trucks and politicians during my newspaper reporting career.
With my retirement Dec. 1 I will finally be free of the stupidity of editorial meetings and decisions, but I will undoubtedly still have a hunger to write. Thus this blog, which will provide a meager outlet for me to reach family, friends and those stuck in the morass of daily reporting.
Feel free to weigh in, criticize, lambast, insult and denigrate, you will join a long line of folks who have already done so. The only difference is I won't get paid for it anymore.
I'm a Christian who believes in the Golden Rule, so I won't fire back.