The work noted above is worth well over $100 million with Holland & Hamrick most likely getting a 5.5% fee which amounts to $5,500,000. And Greg Melton is getting a cut out of that. Greg Melton’s daddy-in-law is also the immediate Past Chairman on the Cleveland Community College Foundation and a Board of Advisors member at Gardner Webb. Conflicts of Interest, certainly the “appearance” of a conflict of interest, seems to abound in Greg Melton and daddy-in-law Roger Holland’s likely unethical and maybe criminal connections with Cleveland County agencies.
In regard to the above, there can be no doubt that Greg Melton’s gets a lot of his corn-pone out of his firms work involving County business, including business from Cleveland Community College. The fact that Greg Melton is on the CCC Board of Trustees, where he is supposed to be looking after the best interest of CCC as well as getting his pone from CCC represents a sure fire conflict of interest when the CCC Board of Trustees are making business decisions regarding awarding contracts for building construction projects. There is also lots of reasons ($$$) that Greg Melton does not want to rock the boat when TOP CCC administration members need to be fired because of personal problems and all other problems and issues are resolved.
There are other things involved here that nobody else has ever mentioned. The quality of work CCC, CCS and the County gets from Holland & Hamrick. Let’s look at one example in particular that is an offshoot of one of the lesser mentioned recently disclosed scandals at CCC.
The Wet Server Scandal:
A “server” is an electronic piece of equipment or electronic component used in the internet and for data processing purposes using low voltages computer type “chips.”. A “Data Center” is a building containing many servers. Cleveland Community College has a computer system using a computer room and multiple servers. Special cooling is required for Computer Rooms and like many other electric and electrical systems, water leaking onto and into servers will destroy the operation of the server without external visual damage once the water is removed.
It has been reported that an air conditioning unit had an “accidental leak” that dripped water onto a number of servers at CCC that ruined the servers. The report went on to claim the damaged servers were removed from service and replaced under an insurance claim. However, the damaged servers were installed in an area set aside for a grant application. Visitors, including Vice President (at that time) Joe Biden’s wife and a Presidential Cabinet Secretary were shown the damaged servers and fraudulently told the damaged servers were a vital part of a computer system CCC was seeking a grant for. CCC, as the allegations go, received the grant money and applied some large part of that money to other purposes. In a recent CCC Board of Trustee meeting the Board rejected that allegation and found that all accounting of grant money were done properly. Basically they wrote the whole thing off with little to no investigation of the allegation.
However, I smelled a rat in all this. As an engineer myself I remembered the April 9, 1963 sinking of the USS Thresher. At the time the Thresher was the premier nuclear powered submarine in the US Navy. It was later determined that during deep dive testing a seawater leak sprayed water on an electrical panel supplying power to operate the ships nuclear reactor causing the reactor to suddenly shut down. The submarine was lost in over 8,000 feet of water and all 129 people aboard perished. Since that incident in 1963 and up until today every engineer is taught that electrical equipment and water do not mix. Part of that lesson that applies to data centers and servers in that every effort must be made to ensure that condensed water from air conditioning units must not be allowed to drip onto the servers. That means air conditioning units located in computer room ceilings must not be located above servers and the condensed water must be drained or pumped away by a good system and building design.
