To be clear, Council approved a management contract that reimbursed PNI for expenses back to April (they've been working w/o a contract since then) and that also allowed PNI to "pay back" the program money from a HUD grant that they've (illegally) been using for admin.  The contract also funds the three remaining PNI employees (they layed off 3 last week when they realized that Council was gonna have a bunch of questions about their spending) through January.  I agree with Randy that this should have been done. 

The other contract - the one Council postponed - is for management of the loan program.  The City was asking for $76,000 for PNI in admin expenses (some of it reimbursable for work done since July; some of it for work to be done in the next two months) plus $1M in loan funds.  As I understand it, PNI has only made about $1M of loans in 5 years.  In spite of the fact that Terence Carter and King Purnell said last night that $400,000 of loans are "in the pipeline", it's hard for me to see how they could possibly make $1M of loans between now and 1/31.

Council postponed action on this contract until after the workshop next week, but sent some pretty clear signals that PNI won't have access to the entire $1M.  They may only be charged with adminstering current loans (which is what I think should happen). 

PNI and the EZ have been a mess since the beginning.  There's plenty of blame to go around.  The PNI staff have not functioned well in many instances, and the board has not exercised oversight.  The City in the person of Rene Kesler (one assumes with the Mayor's approval, but maybe not) told PNI to keep working w/o a contract - asssured them that it would be approved.  Yet only Council can approve contracts.  And there's no excuse for this one sitting for 5 or 6 months before it came before Council.

Not to mention the fact that the community fought like cats and dogs over the $$ from the minute HUD announced that Knoxville had qualified for EZ status.  If half as much energy had gone into figuring out how to invest the $$ wisely as went into squabbling over it, we'd all be bettter off.  Add the racial angle, and you've got a nasty mess.  If I'm not mistaken, less than half of the EZ population is African-American, yet the black community felt they deserved the lion's share of the $$$ (and maybe they did, based on sins of the past). 

At any rate, the entire thing is a huge debacle.  One of the speakers last night said PNI should be "euthanized."  I agree with him.  There's just no way to save it in its current incarnation.  It should be allowed to die on 1/31, and the City needs to find a much, much better way to administer these funds, pronto (although it's hard to see how that will happen, since the Community Development Divison should take the lead on that, and it's in total disarray).

BTW, that 1200 page report Randy refers to?  I've talked to some folks who read it, and they say it makes Vickie Hatfield's summary memos look tame in comparison.