Tuesday, September 01, 2015

Council Allows Vision Fleet A Do-Over On Illegal Electric Car Contract

The Indianapolis City-County Council had the Ballard administration nailed to the wall for entering into an illegal contract with Vision Fleet, a company that sprung into existence for the sole purpose of executing an extremely one-sided contract with the City to lease a fleet of electric and hybrid cars that left the City few, if any, remedies to unwind. Despite the fact the contract was void as a matter of law because public procurement laws were ignored in their entirety, and the council had filed a declaratory judgment lawsuit to have the contract so declared, we now learn the council has folded and allowed the mayor's office and the company to complete a do-over to make what was clearly an illegal contract legal.

Fox 59 News says under the terms of an agreement reached between the council, mayor's office and Vision Fleet, a new 4-year contract will be executed in place of the void contract, the fleet of electric and hybrid cars to be leased by the city will be frozen at the 212 vehicles of which the city has already taken possession, and the city will be let off the hook for the remaining 213 vehicles it contracted to lease under the terms of the original 7-year lease. In addition, all future acquisitions of vehicles must be undertaken through the normal competitive bidding requirements mandated by state law, a process the administration sidestepped entirely when it first entered into the contract. The fact that civil and criminal laws were broken in the process is all forgiven. I guess we won't find out the identity of the political insiders who own a beneficial interest in Vision Fleet either, no thanks to federal and state prosecutors who refuse to investigate what was clearly a corrupt and illegal undertaking by Mayor Greg Ballard.
“All parties acknowledge that the public interest is best served when substantial contracts such as these are procured through an open and competitive process whenever such a process is possible,” reads the new agreement in stark opposition to the streamlined non-competitive manner in which the Ballard Administration awarded the original contract to Vision Fleet, a start-up with no other customers, in 2013.
“On behalf of the Mayor’s Office and the City-County Council, it is our mutual desire to put our public disagreements over the Vision Fleet contract behind us,” reads the joint public statement which dismisses the lawsuit council members filed against Ballard to force compliance with city purchasing rules and a re-examination of the original agreement.
I would once again extend my invitation to all of the corrupt pols in Chicago to relocate to Indianapolis where you can steal, bribe and profiteer to your heart's content at the public's expense without fear of prosecution and even manage to get a pat on the back by our local useless media, which seems more interested in aiding and abetting the politicians and their political cronies in the theft of public assets than exposing them.

10 comments:

Flogger said...

Well I think we all knew the "fix" was in. The City-County Council has just decided to look the other way along with our intellectually vacant Propaganda Ministry Outlet also known as the News Media.

I am sure there are a lot of big smiles, high fives, chest thumping, expensive drinks and a table well stocked with expensive finger foods for those in on the deal. Ballard never had a worry at all about this scheme.

Greg Wright said...

Did anyone on the City Council vote against this "fix"?

Gary R. Welsh said...

There was no council vote that I'm aware of, Greg. I assume this was an agreement reached with the council's leadership and their attorneys.

Anonymous said...

I just saw some of these Blue Indy cars in Broad Ripple. How come Hertz and Avis don't get neighborhood curbside car rental locations? I'd actually use those companies.

Anonymous said...

The next step is to have "Blue Indy Reserved" spaces around town so these renters don't waste time with a long walk from the store to the car.

Yeah, here's the endgame:

"Autolib’ combines a few familiar elements of carsharing services like Car2Go and Zipcar to create something unique. Like Car2Go, the service offers point-to-point parking throughout Paris; but to ensure that cars are always charged at the end of their sessions, they’ve secured designated parking spaces, each of which are equipped with a charging station. While Zipcar acquires many of its spaces from private parking entities, BollorĂ© has secured over 4,300 city-owned parking spaces, in highly accessible curbside and off-street locations. This is due in large part to the fact that the City of Paris has made its downtown parking available in a way that few US cities have done to date."

Bollore works by locking out and disadvantaging everyone not in a BlueIndy car. Just like Mitch Daniels tearing down the Cline Avenue bridge to funnel traffic to his Cintra/Macquarie road, BlueIndy will only work by denying consumer choice and reserving the best driving experience for BlueIndy customers. BlueIndy amazingly will have its entire business model aided by taxpayer dollars and government laws where other car rental companies are left to fight it out in the open market. Bollore’s business model is as sophisticated as a sledgehammer. Government ordains it the market winner and uses everything at its disposal to have BlueIndy be the only choice a customer can make.

This plan has been in the works for a while. They're trying to transform Indianapolis into a carless Midwestern city to see if it will work elsewhere. Putting in those dumb bike trails that destroyed lanes of travel wasn't an accident. This is all part of the plan. Changing downtown from a commercial hub to a residential neighborhood is part of the plan.

The people who own Ballard have decided that it’s worth sacrificing the future growth of Indianapolis’ downtown to run this test or psyop to see how successful a car-based city can be in giving up cars. They also needed a city that wouldn’t drag down the rest of the country if it collapsed. Indy is a perfect test market. Perhaps someone looked at the 25 years since Hudnut and figured nothing new of any size was going in downtown by market choice, so Indy’s stagnant downtown would be perfect to reform as a self-contained micro-macro economy. Apartments next to the Chase Tower with residents walking to the grocery store, the park and to their job in a 49 story skyscraper. That environment doesn’t exist in any major city’s downtown.

Get out of Indy while you can, people. Things are going to get worse before they get better. As the downtown experiment fails, it will require increasingly additional funding from everything outside the Mile Square to prop it up. Your neighborhood will decay and be forgotten all in the service of the Indianapolis Downtown Experiment.

Source: cleantechnica

Anonymous said...

Best Judges Money Can Buy.

One must ask exactly what is going on sub rosa to cause so many to sell their souls to such an obviously illegal scheme.

Anonymous said...

Anon 8:19 makes a very good case and is very much on target. The City Councilor will call 8:19 a "nutjob". The people will know 8:19 speaks truth.

Anyone who has made downtown their home long before this latest emperor crook ascended to the mayoral crown feted by a thoroughly impotent Council knows the urban area is now a far worse place to live. Downtown Indianapolis is sacrificed and the suburbs are the places to go. Oh, wait, socialist Obama has in true fascist form nationalized them....

Anonymous said...

I was curious to see if there is a link between Bollore/AutoLib/Blue/BlueIndy and Agenda 21.

Yeah, it's a big link. The advocates of Agenda 21 boast of participating in Autolib.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.montreuil-autrement.fr/montreuil-lagenda-21-decoit/&prev=search

You're going to be translating some pages, so here's the skinny. In other countries, Agenda 21 isn't seen as a dirty freedom-destroying plan. They see it as a good idea and a national requirement that demands universal compliance. We have some people in Indy who think along these lines. They look weird, eat vegetables and talk funny.

Other countries are quite open about Agenda 21 progress, and they proudly point to the use of Bollore's products and services as helping them meet their Agenda 21 goals. Be clear on this. If there's no Agenda 21, or similar, Bollore and Autolib (BlueIndy) may not exist, at all.

In America, we all know that Agenda 21 is bat**** crazy and an attack on freedom. What was Ballard taught in the Marines that makes him think Agenda 21 is a good idea? Why does Barnes & Thornburg think Agenda 21 is a good idea?

Another realization: The BlueIndy cars all have GPS. Though the Bollore plan charges by time, that's just to solve the billing question. Electric cars are a step in taxing by use, not by annual license.

It seems I'm not saying anything obvious. This guy gets it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAINijx3nqw

Kind of a gold mine. Hit some of the other videos that guy has.

Has anyone seen the documentary "Urbanized?" I'm going to try to find it.

Gary is such a friend to freedom for running this site.

Pete Boggs said...

The equivalent of 220V power cords, high voltage (non UL approved?) charging stations & coal powered cars with lithium toxic batteries, parked along busy & occasionally icy streets or public property- what could go wrong? Where are the enviro-mental on this issue?

Scenario: BCI vehicle involved in crash dislodging battery pack(s) resulting in the dispersal of lithium. Crash scene is now a HAZMAT site. Liability? What is government doing in the rental car business- where is that permitted within the Constitution?

Anonymous said...

Evidently, the Bollore car has a proclivity to catch on fire while parked.

Bollore blames this on vandals, not thermal runaway in the battery charging process.

Nice to have a time bomb on Indy streets, maybe in front of your house.