One year later, what lessons can be learned from the Septage Treatment Plant fiasco? There's plenty of blame to go around, and no shortage of those to assign it to.

As this Record-Eagle article shows, blame should be placed first with the water and sewer committee, comprised of the supervisors of Elmwood, East Bay, Garfield, Peninsula, and Acme townships at the time the decisions were made. In the case of Elmwood township, that would have been former Supervisor (2000-2004) Noel Flohe who signed off on a financing scheme that was politically expedient but woefully unrealistic.

Second, blame accrues to the Grand Traverse Board of Public works, whose chairman, Doug Mansfield, recently acknowledged that the BPW acted as a rubber stamp for the water and sewer committee in the matter.

Third, project manager and BPW attorney Michael Houlihan shows up badly. Houlihan helped sell an unrealistic project to the water and sewer committee, and continues to profit handsomely from the project's legal fallout.

Fourth, the Gordie-Fraser company seems to have displayed a remarkable level of incompetence on the project, their engineer professing ignorance of industry standards for walls like the one that failed.

Is there any theme that pulls it all together? We think so. Michael Houlihan has been the BPW attorney for decades. Gordie-Fraser has been the DPW's engineer for almost 40 years. Gordie-Fraser wrote the request for proposals on the project and got the job even though they were not the low bid. In Elmwood, Gordie-Fraser has played a similar role, serving for years as the township's engineer, representing developers before the planning commission, and taking an active role under Flohe's administration in the drafting of the township's new zoning ordinance. In every case at each point along the line, cronyism and favoritism diminished the possibility of doing the project right.

The septage plant fiasco was a project that was managed by the old boy network for the old boy network--and it turned out just as badly as do most enterprises where merit, openness, and impartiality go by the wayside. When will we stop doing things this way in Leelanau County?