Something’s Wrong at City Hall
No blame, no names, O.K?
But Wednesday night’s City Commission meeting at Old City Hall was just awful.
It was way too rancorous and something bad is going on.
We’ve already lost assistant city manager Mark Finigan and who knows what might happen next.
The meeting was inauspicious from the outset, with a report from Mote Marine that our reef has lost 90 percent of its indigenous coral.
The only auspicious moments of the evening were a standing ovation for Commissioner Clayton Lopez, whose life has been formally recognized as one that “emulates and furthers the dedication and dream of Dr. Martin Luther King,” Jr., followed by the congratulations of commissioners to City Attorney Shawn Smith for achieving an impeccable staff evaluation.
The big business of the night was to discuss the fate of a ball field located off Front Street in that ghost of a park known, for an unseemly number of years, as Truman Waterfront. The question was whether this on-again, off-again parcel should be irrigated, at a cost of $70,000, or not. By the end of the evening there were evident fissures in the caked mud of this little field that had evidently spread through City Hall and even reached the Navy.
Impatient seething between Ron Demes, business manager at the Navy base, and the city’s planner, Don Craig, seemed to match the heavy breathing that’s been going on for the past 10 years by a public waiting for something to actually happen at this so-called park.
“I’ve become a little stressed and you can hear it in my voice,” said Craig. Demes said he was only asking for a little “courtesy.” Interjected Commissioner Lopez, “I agree with courtesy, but also in legal standards.”
Robert Cintron, representing the Truman Waterfront Advisory Board (with its uneasy acronym of TWAB) commented that the whole degenerating meeting was “a microcosm demonstrating our own frustration.” A fellow member of the board, Jim Gilleran, he said, “has suffered through this for years and years.”
Commissioner Teri Johnston reminded fellow commissioners and the public what they already knew well, that dreaming about Truman Waterfront has undergone a decade of charettes plus 50 to 60 meetings to “determine its configuration.” And now, she added, “We have undermined the plan for the last three months.”
The meeting continued to devolve. Said one commissioner: “We’re putting each other on the hot seat.” We also heard this: “The city manager has set us up for failure.”
The bickering was symptomatic not only of the bog that Truman Waterfront has turned into over too many years but also of some systemic problem in the workings of City Hall.
How’s this from the city manager in answer to one question: “I can’t answer that. Staff can’t answer that. No one in this room can answer that.”
Opined Commissioner Mark Rossi, standing in as vice mayor (Craig Cates was at a mayor’s conference in Washington, D.C.): “We need to get this straight!”
Concluded Clayton Lopez, disarmingly: “We’ve lost sight of what the people told us they wanted.”
By 4 to 2 votes, the commission ultimately agreed to restore the ball field, contingent on an irrigation sprinkler system that the Navy has yet to approve —
thus making the whole project temporary with no expiration date.
“Temporary?” warned Commissioner Billy Wardlow. “Sometimes that means forever.”
Perhaps the Last word should go to the Buddha: “Well-makers lead the water wherever they like; carpenters bend a log of wood; good people fashion themselves.”
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Fine reporting on a sad situation. To paraphrase Matthew, “For where two or three gather at city hall, there shall be a pissing contest.” Love the concluding quote.