politics

while i was out putting the hurt on north atlantic shellfish stocks, it would seem that some enterprising lowell city councilors were meeting in an attempt to do the same thing to our projected 2010 city budget deficit. with literally hundreds of millions of budgeted expenditures under their purview, it stood to reason that the magnificent nine could find *something* worthwhile to work on. so, i left the country confident my home town was in good hands...

well, i'm back, and while the north atlantic shellfish stocks will likely recover, it's pretty clear that the over three hundred million in spend spend spend that are our city books were never in any real danger. to wit, the sole and solitary position of "assistant to the city manager" and his $82,000 salary have been hand selected as the single solitary thing that could possibly be cut after hours (literally--hours) of deliberation.

i don't know andy sheehan. i don't know if he's $82,000 of dead weight, or god's gift to city administration and a bargain at any price.

i do know that "alive. unique. inspiring." and the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spent to come up with it is a crock of shit.

i do know that funding shortfalls in the tens of millions cannot be meaningfully improved by paring five-figure salaries one at a time at city council budget meetings.

i do know that something about this stinks so profoundly of hypocrisy and personal politics that the whole lot of 'em would seem to need to be taken out behind the tsongas arena (remind me again how much we lost on that last year?) and tossed in the merrimack to start to get the stench off our fair city.

one position??? really???

i took a pretty hard stance on the city school budget, knowing that to make this whole dog and pony show work we were going to have to do a lot of belt-tightening across the board, and whining about having to do ones fair share was completely off the track. i'm actually pretty impressed with the way the schools are making progress toward their share of the number, by the way, in case you are interested. but this nonsense with the city council is such an insult to the city unions making concessions, and the city schoolkids bearing at yet another hit against their educational life chances, that it just has to be called out and held up to the light for what it is.

again, i don't know andy sheehan or the first thing about his relative worth to the city of lowell. i do know that a city councillor who says something to the effect that until the meeting that he voted to cut the position he didn't even know what the assistant to the city manager did has pleaded sufficient facts to being a lazy city councilman, if not an outright incompetent one.

and i do know that i'm going to be an active campaigner for new faces on the council in this next election, and a vociferous critic of the idiocy that we're enduring these days. this isn't a conservative thing or a liberal thing or a republicrat thing or a demican thing--it's a clean government thing, and though i lack the sort of evidence that the DA seems to have on rita faticanti for her upcoming trial regarding alleged threats against our school superintendant, i am certain i have all the evidence needed to conclude that the majority of our sitting city council are putting personal politics above the best interest of our city in this case, and it's up to me as a member of the electorate to call bullshit on that.

bullshit, lowell city council. i call bullshit.

explain to me how i'm wrong.