All I Know

Like Will Rogers, all I know is what I read in the newspaper.  And also like Will, the newspaper that I read is the Claremore Progress.  And mostly what you learn about in the Claremore Progress is, well, Claremore.  I can’t help but think that Will learned a lot more than I did by reading the Claremore Progress.  For example, there was a little scandal that brewed up a few months ago.  And while I tried my best to get the gist of it from the articles in the paper, I’ll have to admit that I am still somewhat in the dark.  But here is what I do know.  The mayor and several city council members claimed that several other city council members did something unethical.  There was a nearly full front page article about it every day for a week or more, and while names were named and accusations were flying, the actual nature of the ethics violation was not mentioned.  The writers were especially masterful at keeping that crucial bit of information hush-hush.  That’s as specific as I can get because as I said, all I know is what I read in the paper and the paper just did not say.  We all hoped to find out when it was scheduled to be discussed at an open council meeting.  But then someone actually found a procedure that had been established to deal with accusations of ethics violations whereby a pre-appointed ethics committee would investigate the allegations and make recommendations to the council as to what action to take based on its findings.  I think the fact that ethics violations were anticipated and a committee pre-appointed says a lot in itself, but that has to be considered information derived from “reading between the lines” and I can’t really give the paper credit for it.  We were all dismayed though when it was announced that none of that would be open to the public.  But at least we were all confident that it would be dealt with fairly and ethically, given the impeccable credentials of the members of the ethics committee.  It was not like Congress where the same foxes guarding the hen house also served on the ethics committee.  This was a committee of honest citizens ready and willing to pursue this matter with integrity.

But it never got to that point.  Before the committee could meet to hear the allegations, the members that were accused began resigning.  Not because they had done anything unethical but because, in their opinion, the allegations were so ridiculous that they did not merit a defense.  The noble thing to do was to resign for the good of the city so the time and money spent investigating could be saved and the distraction of it all to the conduct of city business would be avoided.  All very honorably and meticulously reported and carefully swept away without the allegations ever really being divulged.  Then a few of the accusers also resigned followed by the city manager and most of his staff.  All of that was right around election time so we held one of them also.   Now we have a new city council, a new mayor, a new city manager and staff and as far as I can learn from the newspaper, everything is going great again even though many of us (I hope I’m not the only one) never found out what the problems were in the first place.

In fact it seems to me that things might be going too good.  Instead of just bickering among themselves the new city government has taken to trying to solve some problems.  The only trouble I can see in that is that they are trying to solve problems we’ve never even had.  One thing that wasn’t broke that got fixed was the garage sale ordinance.  According to the paper there has been a problem for many years.  Many people have a weekend garage sale once in a while. They put out signs and sell stuff in their driveways and the neighbors are inconvenienced for a couple of days by the traffic but that is just the nature of the garage sale and everybody can live with it.  A few people have garage sales every weekend and all week in between and never pick up their signs so their neighbors are inconvenienced all the time and the city has to pick up the signs from street corners and people just can’t live with that.  Now the police say that when they are called to the site of a “perpetual” garage sale it is hard for them to do anything because there is no record of how many garage sales have been held at the residence or how long one has been going on.  There is just no way for the police to curb this insidious practice.  I guess, in spite of all the fancy computers we’ve bought for them, that nobody ever thought of writing down and filing that complaint to check on the next time.  So that’s when the City Council jumped in to save the day.  The only way, they could figure, to keep a record is if everybody who has a garage sale has to buy a five dollar permit from the city to do it.  That way, the police won’t have to do too much fancy police work.  You either have a permit that you’ve paid for with your first hour’s profit, or you get fined two hundred bucks, the whole day’s profit.  They also claim that the five bucks is merely to offset the cost of maintaining the permit system and since most people who have a garage sale put an ad in the paper, the most convenient place for citizens to get fleeced by the city is at the Claremore Progress office where the permits can be purchased.  If you just have to have a dose of dealing with a city employee, you can also buy them at city hall.

Now if this isn’t an example of getting all the government that you pay for, I don’t know what is.  We finally have a city government progressive enough to enact an unnecessary permit yet compassionate enough to make it convenient for citizens to purchase it.  And they did all of this without accusing each other of anything.

 Will was right.  You can learn a lot from reading the Claremore Progress.  And now, you can even conduct some of your city business right there at the newspaper office.  I think they should deputize all the Claremore Progress carriers.  That way they could check on those garage sale permits while they’re delivering the news and save the police that much more work.  If we could keep the costs down, I guess the cost of the permit could come down.  But I don’t think I’ll count on that.