Department or department?

Cheif administrative officer Jonathon Leopold keeps pushing the limits of the public's credulity. Take a look at this recent email between Leopold and city councilor Marissa Caldwell in which Leopold tries to defend calling Burlington Telecom a "department" in a recent Free Press Op-ed.

From: Jonathan Leopold
To: Marrisa Caldwell
Hello Marrisa-

Thank you for forwarding this email to me.

The remark that I have incorrectly or inappropriately referred to BT as a "Department", is not correct. If Mr. Feeney read the article carefully, I did not call BT a "Department".

In fact what the article asked in one question was "is BT the only city department to use pooled cash. By inference one would conclude that I called BT a “department”. The use of a small letter "d" for "department" instead of the capital "D" for Department was intentional since BT is not a formal "Department". I used the term "department" in lieu of more complicated, but technically correct terminology such as "enterprise fund accounting entity" or simply “enterprise fund”. However, then the question would have been phrased "are there any other "accounting funds or other entities" which have used pooled cash. The technically correct language would have been confusing to the public and would have made an already lengthy article even more so. As it was even with extensive editing, the article was more than 50% longer than the normal limit for the BFP. Thus, I used the term "department" as a more meaningful term for the public to understand the use of pooled cash by all of the various entities of the City, including Departments, Divisions, Special Projects, Capital Projects, Enterprise Funds, Special Revenue Funds and Trust Funds, etc.

Finally, Mr. Feeny's incorrectly states that because BT was not a "Department", "allocating funds from the city cash/pool/resources should never have occurred in the first place". Like much of the public "discussion" about BT, this statement is incorrect.

In fact many of the accounting entities participating in pooled cash are not "Departments". I have no idea what Mr. Feeny's alleged expertise is to make such a statement but he is incorrect

Please feel free to share this response with the people in the original
email.

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That's ridiculous! If he wanted to avoid causing confusion he should have used the technically correct language, not wrong, obviously misleading language.

I didn't care for the " alleged expertise" remark, either. What was the point of that?