The discussion was pretty heated from the beginning (in between Quen Be De Knudson’s babbling – do you even know WTF you are talking about half the time? She made this comment about ‘working as a team’. What team are you talking about De? The Dave and De team that meets in secret and doesn’t let any of the other councilors in on anything?)
But Greg Jamison’s anti-first amendment and anti-citizen dissent speech was strange at best. I’ll have to give Kermit credit on this one, he took the high road. I think he realized trying to explain citizen’s free speech rights to Greg Jamison would have taken a lot of time so he just said “I’ll just disregard your comments.”
The video is well worth watching. As usual, Bob Litz gets frustrated and makes smartass remarks. He said that he was wondering if he was going to be charged for listening to Kermit’s lecture at last week’s land use meeting (referring to him being a college professor).
This is a good old fashioned political lynch mob, make no mistake about it. I hope Kermit continues to take the high road.
• On a side note, Kenny Anderson Jr. brings up the Arena contract negotiations and their contract renewal and asks why he can’t get any info from the mayor’s office on the issue. Kenny gets quite mad, especially since the city attorney was not there to answer his questions. Kenny, I’m sure Judge Bob was busy at Michelle’s coffee giving dirty stares to sarcastic bloggers 🙂
UPDATE: The Gargoyle Leader explains the situation, but leaves out some deets;
Jamison said he was disappointed by Litz’s behavior, and he said Staggers used the meeting to issue a “political positioning statement.”
“I really think we took a step backwards,” Jamison said.
First off, Kermit asked Greg what political statement he was referring to, and Greg proceeded to read a statement Kermit made during the land use meeting, and Kermit reiterated, “What part of that statement is political?” Greg couldn’t tell him. The irony of it all is that anything politicians say or do is ‘political’ they are politicians, so it was an incredibly stupid statement by Greg, but not surprising, the theatre major often has ridiculous speeches. Remember this is a guy who wore a AC/DC shirt to a informational meeting and tore up fake million dollar checks during an informational in a strange attempt to promote a new Events Center. Secondly, Kermit agreed with Greg that it was a ‘Step backwards’ especially when you try to squelch citizen’s free speech rights.
And Pat put it in persepective;
Costello also tried to put the issue to rest.
“From time to time, there’s going to be disagreements, and that’s probably a healthy thing,” he said.
Pat is right, that is the job of governing bodies, to debate issues, sometimes those debates are ugly, that’s government folks, take it or leave it. Playing nice and rubber stamping every piece of legislation isn’t always a good idea. Just look at what we got the first 6 years of the Bush administration with that approach, a freaking disaster.
And in reference to the campground ordinance that they were debating, I found this statement to be funny;
Regardless, the people there now are heading out. Dennis Nelson said he plans to move his camper to another campground outside the city, as do other residents. Nelson said he has to laugh when he hears city officials talk about affordable housing and homelessness, but then they come down on people living in campers and RVs.
“None of this is making any sense,” he said. “With all of this, it’s just not worth the problems.”
That is typical of the city, in the name of ‘progress’ they are often pushing the working poor to find other places to live. They did it when they tore down Penn View and they did it again when they tore down houses in the Pettigrew Heights neighborhood. They say they want to clean up the neighborhoods and give these people better places to live, but what they do not realize is that they cannot afford these ‘better places.’ Some councilors really need to walk a mile in these people’s shoes sometime, and wakeup to what is going on in this community.