More than two years have passed since the scandal broke, and it's time the public learned whether the people who ran Tampa's housing program were engaged in criminal behavior or were merely scummy opportunists.
Tampa's new mayor, Pam Iorio, needs to know whether the problem was people, the system or both. The city's effort to house low-income people is too important to drift under a cloud of suspicion. If charges are imminent, prosecutors should bring them. But if the scandal is no longer a priority, then authorities should end the uncertainty and clear the way for the city to make a fresh start.
Then-Mayor Dick Greco and the previous City Council could have made this investigative task easier had they addressed early on the complaints by residents about the operations of former housing boss Steve LaBrake. These residents implored the Greco administration and the council to launch an investigation more than five months before the housing scandal publicly broke. By August 2001, the story took shape: contracts, favors and financial irregularities between the housing office and a principal city contractor.
LaBrake eventually lost his job, as did the head of a nonprofit agency that had business and personal ties to LaBrake. Iorio has vowed to enforce stricter ethics codes and to make nonprofits more accountable when acting on the city's behalf. But those outcomes address only half the damage. Aside from the issue of whether crimes were committed, the city has no clear idea how far the corrupted decision-making went, no idea if the heavy reliance on nonprofits is flawed or whether any changes in management or personnel could prevent the same thing from happening again.
Prosecutors need to issue their findings. If state and federal laws against public corruption don't address the contractual and ethical misdeeds in Tampa, then the city needs to adopt tighter procedures on doling out public money.
