Citizens get no respect
To the editor:
There Is Something Happening Here (lyrics by Buffalo Springfield):
Monday’s contentious Cape Coral Council Workshop gave us yet another clear signal that city administration has no respect for either our citizens or City Council while it continues to aggressively promote its UEP agenda. Mark Mason, director of Financial Services, offered a contrite apology for his self-proclaimed “poorly coordinated” press conference that announced an inflammatory 92 percent utility rate increase over the next five years. Some Council Members readily accepted his apology, considering it to be an honest mistake, while Member Brandt appropriately did not. Then add City Manager Stewart’s explanation that he was in Tallahassee and unaware of these events until after the fact.
Did you just have a Nixon flashback and think “plausible deniability”? In a final act of “authority,” Stewart then proceeded to scold Member Brandt regarding his critical review of a set of conflicting city documents, as if Brandt were a recalcitrant child. Houston, we have a problem.
In any well-run public corporation, if its CFO conducted a press release containing controversial EPS (earnings per share) and dividend forecasts without prior review and approval from executive management, s/he would be summarily terminated (and forever banned from all boardrooms). When city staff no longer believes that its employer has the unilateral authority to determine: policy, city direction and public information management practices, it is operating in an open and notorious state of mutiny.
Of course, this latest performance continues to feed the erroneous assumption that the recently halted UEP plan is the cause of rate shock for existing rate payers. Although staff is quick to point out that it has never made that claim, it is also clear that they have been perfectly content not to share information (regarding their swelling budgets and consistently inaccurate forecasts) that would refute this misconception. Council, wake up nobody jumpstarts an overly-expensive, $500-plus million expansion project into a largely uninhabited “foreclosure zone” to solve a $4 million debt service problem nobody!
Everybody sing together now, “Stop, hey, what’s that soundEverybody look what’s going downWhat a field-day for the heat”.
Tell us what you think at TheRoadAheadCC@gmail.com.
Gary King
SW Cape Coral