Getting It Down Pat

Please spare me the kinder, gentler spin on Pat Awada [“Is This Woman Ruining Our State?,” July]. As state auditor, her responsibility is to oversee $17 billion in local government spending. As the previous owner of Capital Verification, a telecom industry oversight company, she failed consumers to the tune of $222,000 in her clients’ fines and complaints in seven states. She is hardly fit to be state auditor. “The industry is sleazy,” she tells us. “Every telecom has these problems,” she says. As auditor, would she accept similar excuses from any of the cities she audits? If Pat is the “Future of Minnesota,” then Minnesota is in for years of failed oversight from its state auditor, and possibly years of faulty leadership from its governor, senator, or whatever position the Republican Party anoints her to run for next.
Tom Madden
Minneapolis

The picture of one of my favorite officers of the state caught my eye as I eyeballed the magazine shelves at Barnes & Noble in Edina. There was Pat Awada next to a great question: “Is our spunky state auditor making a Republican out of you?” I hope the answer for the majority is a resounding “Yes!” I’m one of those “anti-tax” Republicans who lives across the freeway from the Awadas and found myself at odds with Pat, the mayor, when she was pushing the community center onto Eaganites, who had just approved her community pool a couple years before (though I didn’t object to the pool as much as I did the community center). But now that it’s built, I’m succumbing to the thought that perhaps it was a good idea. I’m actually an “Eagan ambassador” now, and I led tours through the center when it first opened. Pat has always been an aggressive, competitive, and forward-looking person who has a creative mind, which I hope she uses to expose the waste in the 4,300 units of local government she is overseeing. If she can save us taxpayers a mere 10 percent of the $17 billion, she will be worth her weight in gold.
Alice Kreitz
Eagan

I feel there was one essential fact missing from the article about Minnesota’s current state auditor: Her name is Pat Anderson Awada. It was good enough for the election ballot… I wonder why it isn’t good enough for the office’s letterhead. Ah! At this time, there is no need to manipulate the citizens of the state to get elected!
Chris Olson
St. Paul

Thanks for your article on Pat Awada. It was the first article I’ve seen in the local press that was free of total negativism. It read more like a good short-story characterization. I got a feel for who she is, perhaps for the very first time. She is controversial. So, apparently, am I. In fact, I’d be interested in what Pat has to say about an ad campaign we’ve been running for the City of Excelsior in your magazine (placed right at the end of her article). Some people are reading this as “anti-business,” but the opposite is true. Excelsior simply wants unique businesses that go against the grain. Kind of like Pat Awada. How you read her depends on what is written about her. Thanks for an article that allowed me to decide, instead of told me what to decide.
Chris Birt
Minneapolis