Thoughts in the new year
I attended my first council meeting this year on Tuesday. After giving a lot of thought to the city council in 2019, I would like to congratulate and thank Charlie Box as my hero for the year. I don’t agree with Mr. Box on everything he votes for, but I think he is one of the only voices of reason we have. He made a stand last fall against the Mayor to give raises to our heroic firemen that were not getting promoted but doing work above their pay grade. Going against the Mayor usually involves a price to be paid, but Mr. Box made a stand and I thank him.
The losers of 2019 are the voters of Ward 4 who voted for Pierre Beard. After some obvious coaching by the Mayor, Mr. Beard made a motion to table these long-overdue raises by saying he was new to the council and needed to look into the matter. Keep in mind he has not had any issues with voting on any other matters, only denying the firemen their proper pay. Anyone who wants to run for this or any other office should at least attend the meetings and have some understanding of the office. I attend all the council meetings unless I am out of town, and I do not recall ever seeing Mr. Beard at any of them. I also can’t find where Mr. Beard owns any property, yet you vote for him to make decisions on taxation for your property.
On the other side of that equation we have Mr. Mickens who does own property but does not see the need to pay his property taxes on time. Every time Mr. Mickens speaks you can always count on a nugget coming out of his mouth and it is not gold. At the end of the 2018 fiscal year when we discovered the city was over $800,000 short on funds, Mr. Mickens asked something like does that mean we can’t borrow no more money? There seemed to be no concern on his part where the money went and we have not gotten an answer yet. At this Tuesday’s meeting we were finally promoting the firemen. His question was were we creating new positions in the department. If a councilman that has been there as long as he has doesn’t understand how the fire department is structured, then I would count him as unqualified to be a councilman. This is also a man that received over 40% of the votes for chancery clerk after he admitted in a speech that he really did not understand the job or what it entails. Why would you vote for a person that does not know how to do a job? Vote for people that are capable of doing the job.
Our city is in horrible shape. We are getting potholes in our potholes, the roads are the worst I have ever seen. The police and fire departments are train wrecks. Columbus existed 192 years without a city project manager and we did a lot better than we are doing with one. Our Mayor will be throwing Jabari Edwards and J5 all the money he can this year since he feels the financial crisis is over. Keep in mind that based on public documents, this organization and its owner owe in excess of $1,000,000 in federal taxes and will get plenty of yours. Based on the city’s four day work week Mr. Edwards gets $430 per day before he stretches, yawns or scratches his backside. This is not counting his percentage of all projects by the city.
On a brighter note there are people like Joe Max Higgins who has spent 17 years doing a brilliant job of promoting our community and creating jobs. We should all buy him a bottle of scotch and thank him.
Kerry Blalock “the concerned and angry citizen”
Columbus
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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