Other factors aside, such as whether it's appropriate for Darrell Best, as president of GREDC to be pushing using 4b funds to hire an events coordinator whose boss is the chamber board when he is himself president of the Chamber of Commerce, OR whether maybe the events coordinator ought to be a position within open goverment, within the city province, the question comes up...

CAN the 4b board give out money to an entity for just any old job? (And let me say that I don't care if you've heard of some other city doing it, they just might not have been told to cut it out. It isn't like there's some strong oversight from the Comptroller's office.)

Here's what I see from the Attorney General's website, publication section, manual entitled "Economic Handbook 2008".  Look on page 45 (from the PDF) or page 40 as written on the page. Every expenditure from 4b must be as a *project*. Those project must create jobs and the definition is very clear.

Accordingly, most Section 4B projects must now create or retain primary jobs. Yet not all
projects contain this requirement. “Primary job” is defined to mean a job that is “available at a
company for which a majority of the products or services of that company are ultimately
exported to regional, statewide, national, or international markets infusing new dollars into the local economy;” and meet any one of a certain enumerated sector numbers of the North
American Industry Classification System (NAICS).155

Does that sound like an events coordinator to you? If you look on the next few pages in the 4b document there are listings of specific job classifcations. None of them seem to apply.

At the very least, before GREDC or 4b go any further with this, they should consult a competent attorney well versed in 4b law.