The latest in the ongoing wrangling over the National Slavery Museum here in Fredericksburg.

Basically the story right now is that the Slavery Museum received $1 Million from the City of Fredericksburg to do “studies” on stuff like the economic impact of the proposed museum, the traffic impact, demographic studies, all of those sorts of things.

So they did all that, spent all the money (paid for by a tax on downtown biznises), but the catch is that now they are refusing the share the results of the studies with the City. They are saying that the info is proprietary, citing the National Museum of African American History as a competitor who might benefit from the info. (They also claim that they do not compete with that museum. Yeah.)

So there is a big stink over it. The latest news is that the Museum referred the City to their own files on the site approval process way back when. Stuff like, will the site collapse into the river. And the City is like, “uhhhh, yeah we already have those. What did you do with our money?”

The interesting part of the whole mess is that the Museum is Doug Wilder’s baby. You would think that after his wrangling with the VAPAF he would feel a little empathy for public officials dealing with a secretive organization spending the taxpayer’s money on nebulous things like “telephone,” or “study,” but apparently not.