Harold Cogdell: Investigate me! And my Corrupt Colleagues Who Enabled Me!

Mecklenburg County Commission Chairman Harold Cogdell has now gone full Chicago on his corrupt colleagues.

Cogdell’s joke, I mean “job” at the C.W. Williams Community Health Center was created after Cogdell lobbied to get the non-profit health care provider an extra $110,000 in taxpayer funding during budgeting in June. That was quite a feat considering what a tough budget year it was and the fact that the county manager, who has been known to roll and dole himself to politically connected organizations, originally recommended that the group only get $280,000 rather than the $390,000 it eventually got thanks to Cogdell’s lobbying.

Commission Democrats could have cared less about Cogdell payola for months until Cogdell hacked them off this fall by knocking off a Democrat County commission chairperson using Republican votes. Now that, you don’t do. Sow now they care, and they are making a stink about it in public when just months before they could have cared less is Cogdell robbed the public blind for his own personal gain.

So they called for an investigation of Cogdell. He’s agreeing to that — and now calling for an investigation of them, including what they knew about his job and when they knew it:

Cogdell said after the Dec. 6 meeting that he would ask for the investigation, saying he did nothing wrong. But he also wants the investigation to look into whether fellow Democrats on the board knew of the arrangement –and whether they informed the public.

All of which bolsters my theory that when Dems rule a place in which voter demographics give them absolute power as a party, they quickly introduce an in-your-face, Chicago style corruption.

Which is exactly what Cogdell is doing with his yeah-I-did-it-but-they-knew-all-about-it-because-everyone-accepts-this-stuff-now approach. Very Blagojevich. And now, apparently, very Charlotte.