This City Council election — even though hardly anyone, including the candidates, seems interested in it — is not about cheese or schools or who is running for president or any of the half-baked ideas that have been floated. It’s about the same things city elections are always about: Who is going to keep the streets paved?
It’s that simple. Vote for the person who will do that. Otherwise, we’ll get the same crap we usually get — not enough cops on the street, no books in the library, a city animal shelter that has taken more than a decade to build (another boondoggle that has not been reported), a dying downtown while developers get tax breaks to build hotels for rich people, and all the rest of it.
There’s a stretch of Trammel, between Abrams and Fisher just south of Lovers Lane, that a city crew started tearing up around St. Patrick’s Day. It’s now Mother’s Day, and it’s still torn up. Because no one downtown is interested — not in the manager’s office and not on the council. It will get done when it gets done, which is how they approach too many of these sorts of things. That the street is unsafe, with huge stretches of pavement missing and almost no signs or cones or construction horses to warn drivers, is apparently irrelevant.
Or, as Molly Ivins once put it: "But they work for us. It’s our job to keep them under control until we can replace them. Time to get up off our butts and take some responsibility here. Let them hear from you."
