Thursday, April 24, 2014

More details on Mayor vs City Council squabbles

Thanks to the adept reporting skills of Ms. Desire Grover, the Community Spirit paper has uncovered the relationship between Chester’s chief of staff and the library.

The mayor doesn’t feel he can afford to pay for a chief of staff but the city council can’t seem to live without a chief of staff. So, the mayor told them to pay for it. And they did. It sort of makes you wonder what the role is of chief of staff if the position is as disposable as the mayor implies.

The mayor says the $150,000 to the library was not part of the city budget and was considered a gift. I had a copy of a past year city budget and the library money was a line item. I don’t recall it termed as ‘gift’. I don't understand that highfalutin budget stuff anyway.

All I know is that the city would rather sent $75,000 in cash for an empty long neglected abandoned school needing millions more to renovate than spend a single $1 on a library struggling to survive until new tax revenue kicks in. 

In The Spirit article it states, “Mayor Linder says asking questions is what the community should do and he believes the city should have an answer.” Unless the city is represented by ‘Anonymous’, questions asked on this blog are never answered. 


4 comments:

  1. City purchases that don't seem to make sense means you aren't looking at an obscure part of the transaction,e.g., like the political connections of the seller and the, direct or indirect,source of the money of the purchase money. When a Mayor doesn't need a Chief of Staff then there's little need to coordinate the activities of his operational organization or those activities are being coordinated or directed from another source of power and authority.

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    1. That may be correct. It's difficult to determine who is making decisions and policy which makes it even more difficult to determine the direction things are going. If no one else has noticed, frustration is growing and no one is responding to the streets. Who is the go to guy or gal?

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  2. The mayor has a whole crew around him and as he said Rion Starr is not his chief of staff. If he is council chief of staff we should be asking what are his duties?

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