News-Record.com

At Tom Phillips' prompting, the City Council has voted unnamimously to request records of an SBI investigation into the Project Homestead fiasco.

Which would be encouraging if it weren't two years after all the news surfaced about the council's repeated lack of oversight on how taxpayer money was being spent by the now-defunct nonprofit homebuilder. And the council's hindrance of city staff's attempts to more aggressively audit Homestead. And its insistence on blaming the media (in other words, the News & Record) for bringing this nettlesome stuff up in the first place, instead of dealing honestly with the obvious litany of screw-ups. And so on.

If the details of the report are released, and they should be, very embarrassing details about some council members are likely to come to light. But, frankly, the council had no choice but to all go along with Phillips' idea. Voting no would have looked awful, especially right before an election.

But the council ought to go further than the SBI report and devote a full meeting (or more) to an honest debriefing on what went wrong and how not to repeat it.

Sort of its own Truth and Reconciliation session.