Auto Insurance Missouri Attorney General

A sweet deal gone sour

A landlord is out $6,000 for four apartments leased by Mamtek. City Bank is suing Mamtek and the Moberly Industrial Development Authority over $28,000 owed on two vehicles. Construction contractors are owed in excess of $1 million, sources said, the bulk being owed to Septagon Construction Co., which ran the job from its Columbia office.

And 15 people — some who moved hundreds of miles to work for an exciting startup — are left without paychecks and health insurance. The health insurance coverage expired last night, and with no company to pay the premium, the workers can’t even keep their COBRA coverage.

As official Moberly keeps its fingers crossed in hopes that former Mamtek CEO Bruce Cole can make good on his latest promise to deliver $250,000 on Monday, there is little hope that any of those owed money will be paid. Debts to those creditors were not included in the city’s agreement with Cole’s new business, American Sucralose Manufacturing Inc.

And with the company gone, it would make little sense to sue Mamtek, said landlord Larry Schnell of Centralia, who builds and renovates homes in Moberly and elsewhere. “They called me a week before Labor Day and said they were out of money,” he said.

Olivia Lindsey was Mamtek’s human resources director. She received a call Sept. 2 that she was being laid off as Mamtek cut staff. Lindsey was living in St. Charles and working for Covidien when she took the job at Mamtek. Now, instead of returning to St. Charles, she is opening a restaurant in Moberly.

Attempts to contact other former employees, ranging from top managers to engineers to others working under Lindsey, were not successful. Many have returned to where they came from, including New Haven, Conn.; Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio.

“All of us left great careers to come to Mamtek,” Lindsey said. “And all of us were just left with nothing.”

Mamtek arrived in Missouri with great promise in July 2010. Gov. Jay Nixon, former Gov. Bob Holden and Cole announced the company’s arrival to a packed room at Moberly Area Community College. The company would bring 600 or more jobs in a few years, they said, and provide a major boost to a community struggling with unemployment above 10 percent.

Get in line, flood victims (AUDIO)

By the end of the week, the longest flood in recorded Missouri River history will be history itself.  Next is the challenge of paying for recovery from the disaster.

From Montana through Missouri, floods and high water have caused billions of dollars in damage to levees, roads, bridges, homes, businesses, dams, and farms.  Preliminary damage estimates are given in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars but until the water goes away, definitive numbers cannot be calculated. Once they are, what then?

That’s the big question for FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, and other disaster response agencies.

Brigadier General John McMahon, the commander of the Corps of Engineers Missouri River basin division, says people affected by the Missouri River Flood of 2011 will just have to get in line.

                                        BG John McMahon :31 mp3

He says some funding requests are “in the mill” and are doing well in terms of getting seed money for assessments and early repair.  He hopes enough money is available for levees to be rebuilt and other repairs to be made before the 2012 runoff season starting in March.

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