Council must act for the residents
To the editor:
In what could be termed Cape Coral’s finest day of giving, Council members Bertolini, Tate, Donnell, Day and our own ” I don’t want any conflict of interest, I will abstain”, mayor and most forgetful campaign promise keeper, Mayor Jim Burch, gave back to the community. Like a bunch of cheap compasses, spinning relentlessly on a car’s dashboard, they voted to bring back “The Plan”, water and sewer to SW 6/7. Yes, the same cast of characters that have spent more during tenure than any group of five in Cape Coral history. Yes, a group steeped in real estate experience who bought at market peaks for the citizens, while one of its own waited for the market to bottom to make his purchases. So much for experience, your timing has always been precious. We all need more than a couple of bucks back… maybe we can trade a fire engine for a park and cash.
Member Bertolini’s agenda item entitled “Where do we go from here?” brought me out to the Council Chambers. I had a hunch that something was going to happen. Maybe they got the big picture… some percentage of the 50,000 people in the Cape, who bought property in the city after the year 2000, are being crippled every time they opened the council doors. Maybe they now had a solution, and would agree with council members Grill, Brandt and Deile, that the right decision was made to temporarily stop the UEP, until all of the citizens got a better deal from the latest snafu… the North Water Plant. But that wasn’t the case… yet we know it is there.
This would have represented sound management and the understanding of the most basic fundamental economic fact. The city is as strong as the cumulative willingness and ability of its citizens to pay for services provided. They made decisions to reside in the Cape because they thought they could afford to live here. They purchased land for personal or speculative benefit. Their analysis may have been skimpy, but it was financially based. It was not, first and foremost, because of the services provided. No one moved here because of a fire station, police station, school, park or even water and sewer, if they knowingly couldn’t afford it. They expected the mayor and council members to carry out their fiduciary responsibility to keep all citizens whole by maintaining a strong city balance sheet during all economic cycles. They expected the mayor and council members to utilize their knowledge of economic and business cycles, to effectively establish the city’s budgetary objectives, for all of its citizens. They expected the mayor and council members to manage the acquisition of assets and services. They expected projects to be planned, constructed and monitored to control the costs for a clearly targeted group. They expected council members to take corrective actions when any activity went astray. They didn’t expect the council members and mayor be so tightly tethered together, in helpless denial, that they couldn’t / wouldn’t calculate the benefits.
Council Members Grill, Brandt and Deile, recognized through their own due diligence, the divergence of the many issues, which they addressed in their pre-vote comments. They recognized the pain of the ratepayers, the shoddiness of the project proposal, and the fallacy of why water rates will increase. The sum of which was, you can’t layer more bad government on the on the backs of more citizens in a down economy. They worked for the people. They worked for the city. Unemployment will remain high, long after other areas start to improve. We have a years worth of houses on the market now, with more foreclosures coming. They couldn’t afford to blindly move forward and roll the dice. The Cape is at an inflection point on home values, we all lose when they go down. Back to the 2000 level is not an out-of-the-realm of possibility.
Mr. Mayor, you and council members, who used “negativity”, “decorum” and “incivility” as the theme of your post vote comments, raised the bar of scrutiny. Some of the “incivility” issues raised, were clearly out of line, but not new within the Council Chamber. Where was the compelling argument that both groups could agree that you did the work to reach a decision? Where was the beef? Were you all hanging on Council Member Donnell’s statistics of “7 of 80 speakers at the church” but “tonight it’s about 50/50” ? Did you check the validity of the public opinion polls? Did you find that you could vote multiple times on a number of them? Did you track down the sponsor of Nevada calls? Can we expect the culprit to be publicly named?
Good government requires voter participation. It also requires practice. Folks will learn to push for facts. They will only accept hard verifiable data as they become more engaged. Statements “that you (the city) left money on the table” or “you don’t have to keep campaign pledges” will certainly help the enrollment process. Hopefully, you will understand Congressman Willard D. Vandiver’s often quoted statement “I come from a country that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri. You’ve got to show me.”
To go ahead with SW 6/&7, knowing options to lower the cost are available, but not included, is both arrogant and dumb as dirt.
Larry Choquette
Cape Coral