That's the closest anyone on council has come to admitting there was a problem with the city's finance director, Joe Kronstal and his company, Tuaro dairy, owing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Small progress for an obvious conflict of interest.

Now with Kronstal resigning, council and administration may well wish the issue will go away but it will not.

Kronstal isn't helping. He trots out the worn out defence his involvement in the Agriborealis dairy was known when he was hired nine years ago.

When Agriborealis went bankrupt soon after, the city bought it and gave everything back to Kronstal. City administrator Doug Lagore denied Kronstal was in a conflict of interest.

Over five years, Kronstal's new company Tuaro accumulated hundreds of thousands dollars of debt. The city negotiated a generous payment plan to keep Tuaro alive. Lagore denied Kronstal was in a conflict of interest.

Tuaro failed to follow the payment plan and the city failed to collect it ($50,000 of $200,000 arrears). Lagore again denied Kronstal was in a conflict of interest.

It's painfully obvious Lagore either does not understand what conflict of interest means or simply doesn't care and makes city council the dupe.

The latest deal for Tuaro cooked up behind closed doors, to be presented at a "Special Meeting", has more twists and turns.

The $200,000 in lease arrears Kronstal built up has been lumped in with other bills owed to creditors and is not a factor in the sale to a new majority owner for Tuaro.

Another funny clause will see Tuaro pay off $50,000 of those lease arrears and in return get the Gerry Murphy arena to make into a barn. Figure that one out.

The only consolation for this sorry mess is the election coming in October when those on council running again will have to answer for letting Lagore's administration run amuck.

Yellowknifers want a dairy but not at any price.

Between now and the turn of the century, per-student spending levels at the Yellowknife Catholic school board are expected to drop by about six per cent. That may not sound like much, but schools aren't exactly rolling in dough these days and can ill afford the loss.

The cuts, says the board, are due entirely to reduced GNWT contributions. We know things are tight, but do our MLAs really want to run the risk of undermining the education of our youth?

In a jurisdiction with embarrassingly high drop-out rates, cuts to education should be a last resort for a cash-strapped government. We are not convinced things are that bad. Not yet.