The Crestwood Smart Growth Alliance, owned by Kelley Isherwood of Oakville, has launched a petition drive to seek a state audit of Crestwood’s finances.

Crestwood residents may recall that the CSGA boasts it has hundreds of members, yet we continue to see the same handful of people working on behalf of the group — Mr. Isherwood, members of the Boegeman family, one or two misguided city residents and the alliance’s attorney, Mary Schultz, who formerly represented this newspaper.

The Boegeman family owns the Crest Development Co., which owns the Creston Center. Preserving the Creston Center would appear to be a primary — if not the primary — goal of the alliance. The organization’s attorney, Mrs. Schultz, also represents the Crest Development Co., a fact that she has been up front about in her presentations to Crestwood aldermen.

But over the past couple of months, we believe the combined mission of the CSGA and Crest Development is to disrupt the workings of Crestwood city government.

We would say that the two entities have been fairly successful in doing so. For example, Crest Development’s requests for information from the city under the state’s Sunshine Law have resulted in city employees spending more than 40 hours since last May to search and retrieve more than 1,600 pages of documents the city has produced in response to the requests.

The Call always has been a strong proponent of the Sunshine Law, but would characterize Crest’s requests as an abuse of the law.

As for the CSGA’s call for a state audit of Crestwood’s finances, most of the reasons cited by the alliance border on the ludicrous.

Either alliance members don’t have a good grasp of the current situation or they’ve chosen to ignore it.

But such an audit would be beneficial for the current administration.

Mayor Jim Robertson and City Administrator Don Greer were handed a colossal mess when they assumed their respective duties and have done a yeoman’s job of righting the ship.

We believe a state audit would bear that out beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The only down side of a state audit is that the cost would be borne by Crestwood. But it won’t cost the majority of those leading the petition drive one cent because they don’t live in Crestwood.