DEFAULT IS NOT IN OUR STARS, BUT IN OURSELVES: Part 11 — You Ask A Lot Of Questions For Someone Who Lived In Brooklyn
THREE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS (It’s not like I asked him to explain the meaning of life.)
On Monday, February 5, I sent an email to Jack Kidwell, a Director of the State Theatre of Bay City/Bay County.
Kidwell, agent for the Nickless Family Charitable Foundation and a longtime member of the State Theatre Board, brokered the 2016 deal for the Nickless Foundation to donate $1 million to the State Theatre.
Contemporaneous reporting revealed that Kidwell and Mike Bacigalupo hammered out a backroom deal before presenting it to City of Bay City officials:
“There are strong possibilities that if this doesn’t go through, future funding from any community foundation — locally, regionally or nationally — could look at Bay City and it’ll have this black mark,” said Mike Bacigalupo, chief operating officer of the State Theatre and the person behind seeing the pavilion built in the downtown park. “They’re going to say, ‘Are we sure we want to fund something in Bay City?’”
“If this project with the pavilion does not go well, and the family believes that the residents of Bay City don’t want it, the potential for those dollars to stay in the area is not as good,” Kidwell said. “This is a project that is trying to lift up Bay City and the Great Lakes Bay Region area.”
(Must be a watered-down Midwestern version of the classic Mafia extortion phrase: “You got a nice car. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”)
By now you’ve probably guessed that Kidwell did not answer my questions .
Here’s the email, as sent:
DUSTING OFF OLD FILES: “DDA/DMB Staff have been working with Bay Future and The City of Bay City”
File this one under “cavalier dismissal”.
Yesterday, I received another batch of MEDC Revitalizing and Placemaking grant documents filed with the City of Bay City’s June 2022 application.
As I revealed exclusively in a January 31, 2024 post, the “grant did not move forward as planned.”
Here’s the first of many.
