By-Passing Council Shuts Public Out of Process

March 12, 2011 0 Comments

CENTRAL — When City Councilmen tell you they feel the City Council has been emasculated and has no significant role to play in city government, you know there’s a problem. Unfolding before us are the most important decisions facing Central in this four-year period:

• Whether the entire city government will continue to be controlled by CH2MHILL, a $6 billion international corporation based in Denver, Colorado.

• Whether 80 percent of the city budget will be spent each year with no oversight — zero oversight — by the City Council or the public.

• Whether the Public Records Law of our state will continue to be ignored if it involves the $4 million paid to a private contractor.

Central Mayor Mac Watts and his floorleaders have come up with a way to by-pass the City Council in making these important decisions. In the process, they are effectively shutting the public out of the process.

I just pulled out a copy of the election returns from last spring’s municipal elections. Here’s what they showed:

Central City Council
At-Large
Tony LoBue 5,282 71%
Ralph Washington 4,540 61%
Wayne Messina 4,538 61%
Louis DeJohn 4,435 60%
Aaron Moak 4,165 56%

Central Mayor
Mac Watts 4,183 52%

It is very clear from these election results that there was no mandate for one-man rule. On the contrary, the members of the City Council appear to have far more support from the voting public. And the people certainly didn’t elect a committee appointed by the Mayor to make the decisions of elected officials.

The Mayor has appointed a City Services Committee to review the contract with CH2MHILL and make recommendations. No problem with that. But the committee and the Mayor have taken their work far beyond the role of being an “advisory” body.

Now they have approved a “contract” that continues a system of government that is far from what most people in Central want.

Now they are letting that contract out for public bid, or Requests for Proposals, even though that contract and the system of government inherent in it have never come before the City Council.

Even beyond that, the Mayor’s committee has adopted a system to evaluate those proposals, and he has appointed a Nine-Member Committee to choose a winning bid.

Only then will the final selection come before the Council for an up-oo-down vote. It is a process obviously designed to “jam” the Council at the last possible moment and give them little or no choice but to approved the recommendations of the Mayor’s “blue-ribbon” committee.

The appearance is one of “power politics” designed to produce a pre-ordained result.

In the 1800’s and early 1900’s, there were “company towns” in America. You couldn’t live or work in a town without doing what the town’s owner prescribed. Central is today very much on the verge of becoming a “company town.” Here are four examples symptomatic of the problem:

• Councilman Tony LoBue proposed reducing city Building Permit Fees effective immediately. The Mayor told him he wouldn’t mind, provided Councilman LoBue could get the permission of CH2MHILL.

• A company that receives 80 percent of the city’s budget, $4 million, is allowed to pocket that money without a budget, an accounting, or an audit.

• Staged City Council meetings where “the public” is the same group of five or six “insiders” who presume to speak for the public on every issue.

• A relentless attack on every elected official, individual, or business who presumes to object to the party line. Each such person is told in private and sometimes in public to shut up, get out of town, or resign.

Central is too good a place to become a company town. But continued silence and apathy by the general public will result in that becoming a reality.

By Woody Jenkins, Editor, Central City News