It seems that there is a lot of confusion when it comes to the working relationship between the Huntington Municipal Development Authority and the Huntington Area Development Council.
The HMDA has contracted with HADCO to manage the Huntington Industrial Center and Kinetic Park projects. Becky Boright is the person that updates the HMDA board on the goings on with these projects, but it is unclear to HMDA chairwoman Vickie Shaffer for whom Boright works.
Indeed, Boright herself seems not to know. When asked last week for whom she worked Boright said “that question was still being discussed.”
When asked who signed her paycheck, Boright said that “she is paid by several trusts.” When asked again she gave the same answer and would not say who signed her pay checks.
At the July meeting of the HMDA, Shaffer said that the HMDA reimburses HADCO not only for Boright’s salary and benefits, but also her office space.
HMDA has a management agreement with HADCO, and Shaffer said at the meeting that HADCO has notified them “within the last 60 days that they (HADCO) wanted to make changes in that contract.” Shaffer told the HMDA board that she didn’t know “whether we do or do not have a management contract with them (HADCO) at this time.”
It has been learned that the contract between HMDA and HADCO is presently being renegotiated. At the July meeting Shaffer seemed unclear for whom Boright worked. At one point it seemed that Shaffer thought that Boright was an HMDA employee.
“The relationship with HADCO goes back to the early days when the Authority was organized,” said Shaffer. “At that time we had no paid staff, and we had no money to pay any staff.”
“We now have a Huntington Industrial Center, we simply reimburse HADCO for the salary and benefits of our staff person, and we also pay them rent for her (Boright’s) office,” Shaffer told the HMDA Board.
“I think that our administrative process would be much more efficient if we were to move our administrative staff to an office of her own, with full responsibilities, and no question about for whom……whom she’s employed for and who’s she’s working for and where she takes her direction,” said Shaffer.
Shaffer told the HMDA board that Boright was placed in a “rather untenable position where she is faced with a conflict of the goals and objectives of a private, nonprofit organization and their legal requirements versus our own goals and objectives and our legal requirements.”
A recent Freedom of Information Act request reveals that HMDA has no employees.