General Discussion

at a City Council meeting I attended for the first time. I got up to speak and they demanded my name and address or I couldn't speak. Come to find out this very insular and crooked group had been running things for many decades and the purpose of demanding your name and address was for several reasons.

The first was if you were not from that city and they didn't like what you said they would instantly and very vocally decry you as an "outsider" who doesn't "belong" in the meeting. The second was that if you were from the community they would then target you with building inspection etc. I remember one case in particular where a single mom who lived there spoke up about things and her son, never in trouble or problems with grades, immediately started getting targeted in school by teachers and the school cops to the point where he quit and went the GED route. The third was if you were not from the community they would have their people "check you out" and then see what trouble they could cause for you.

To give you an idea of the corruption here is a small example. The city had a population of just under 20,000 and occupies 4 square miles. The city street department budget had an annual expenditure of over $50,000 for "hand tools". That's one hell of a lot of "hand tools" for a city that contracted out almost every aspect of their work. If you sat outside the city garage in the morning you would see about 15 people enter the building and after an hour one of the managers would leave, driving a city pickup truck of course, to go run his private landscaping business. Most days he would be about the only vehicle to leave. You could drive all over the city and not find any workers anywhere doing anything. All day long. Then at quitting time they would all leave the city garage. Day after day. But if you spoke up about these things they would rain hell down on you any way they could.

Even further back I knew a guy who was a county employee for a rural county and he was supposed to do basic maintenance/painting at the county rest home. He would go and punch in first thing in the morning and then drive 3 miles back home and go do side jobs or just hang in his garage and drink beer all day. Then he would go punch out at quitting time. The bosses all knew and they were doing similar things as well.

Crooked local government/police is a huge day to day issue in this country.