By Noah Dawson
As the election season for city council begins, the incumbent members of the council have been celebrating a few major victories they’ve had. With the last year being filled with scandals, protests, and widespread anger, the current council really does have some damage control to attend to. In an editorial earlier in the week, Thomas Warren III wrote about how some of the members of the current council running for reelection have offered grand schemes to attract attention, despite a lackluster track record and previously failed campaign promises. Today, I want to look at three of the supposed accomplishments our council has to celebrate, and take a look at why, even in the few areas our council made progress, they leave much to be desired.
The most recent example is the Coming Home program. Don’t get me wrong, this program sounds incredible, and I am really happy to hear how it is coming together. But, at the same time, it feels like it’s too little, too late. The issue of homelessness has been a flashpoint in our city for quite some time now, but, at least to me, this seems like it’s one of the very rare instances where something positive is being done by our city government. Our city has destroyed homeless camps and arrested people for peacefully protesting the inhumane anti-camping ordinance. I’m not going to claim our council doesn’t care about the homeless, but when you consider the fact that Howard Smith, who has announced his intention to run for reelection, once said that homeless people “are used to being cold,” it makes anything the city does on the issue feel a bit hollow. I just wish the money for this program, wherever it came from, could have come sooner, and that our city hadn’t done some of the horrible things it had done regarding the issue in the past.
Another “win” that the council has to celebrate is the reopening of the wood chipping sites. As Thomas Warren III mentioned earlier this week, the current council is also the one that closed them, and the council didn’t announce they would be reopened until a petition drive to add reopening them to the ballot was started. If this issue were really an example of our council’s leadership, they probably wouldn’t have closed, and if they had, they would have been opened before citizens began a move to try to force the council’s hand.
Finally, the council is celebrating that the baseball stadium shaped money pit, called an MPEV by politicians, is almost finished and is coming in under budget. What isn’t so vigorously celebrated is how bloated the cost was in the first place, or the fact that a citizen has been trying get an injunction to halt construction due to the legally questionable events that led the stadium to be built in the first place. And that’s not even considering the market stunt that is the team name!
The incumbents will no doubted continue to look between the cushions throughout the campaign season to find more hollow victories to share. When they do, remember to ask these questions: Is this what the council actually promised? Did the city really do all it could on the issue? Spoiler alert: in most cases, the answer to those questions will most likely be no.
