The F.O.U.L. Plan’s Railroading Is Business As Usual
Many in Monroe County are shocked and angered at the plan and how it was unveiled at the last minute then rammed through the county leg without public input. They can’t believe that someone as utterly nice and awesome as the Brooks administration would do something like this!
If you’ve just started being outraged, that’s fine– glad you’re finally here. I won’t ask what took you so long– with GOP boss Steve Minarik never missing an opportunity for a Maggie Brooks photo-op, the forest is a leeetle hard to see for the trees.
But at RT we’ve been ringing the alarm bell on this for well over a year. That’s right– you may be thinking “Man, Maggie must’ve had a crappy cup of coffee that morning they unveiled the plan”, but this, my friends, is only the latest in a long, proud, history of ignoring the public for political gain. Let’s stroll back through memory lane…
- * September, 2006: The Republican-dominated County Legislature votes to move the date they submit their budget each year until after the elections in November.
- * October, 2006: Republican legislators Robert Colby and Ciaran Hanna were punished for breaking ranks with the Republican 17-12 majority in the lej, and voting against the move.
- * December, 2006: GOP County Legislators are caught on film having a coffee klatch during public testimony. Do they, embarassed at being caught, file back to their seats to listen to public input? Nope, they glare at the camera, shut the door, and post a bouncer.
- * May, 2007: GOP ram through an unprecedented 12-year, $13 Million contract with Siemens, a company that has been indicted all over the globe, including the US, for corruption that has been described as “systemic†and company wide on an unprecendented level. Oh, and they’re also a major Monroe County GOP contributor.
- * September, 2007: At hearings on COMIDA mismanagement, only Democratic legislators showed up to hear public testimony.
- * September, 2007: Brooks unveils the GOP’s “community solution” for the budget crisis, to a surprised community. The GOP rams it through the legislature in the next 90 minutes, voting down requests by the Dems to study the plan and get public input.
- * September, 2007: Brooks uses a well-known right-wing smear tactic to shut down questioning from Tom Tobin on the D&C editorial board.
- * October, 2007: Brooks holds sham town meetings by phone where softball questions are asked (and her plan is a done deal, anyway).
- * October, 2007: Republican legislature candiates skip Voice of The Voter forum, to avoid pesky voter feedback.
There’s other examples. I wanted to keep this list as short as I could, but it’s hard–there’s so much.
The only conclusion you can really draw from this preponderence of evidence is that the GOP dominance of our county has led to closed-door, back-room, one-shot rulership. And Steve Minarik’s latest crop of candidates looks to be in the same mold.
It’s time to give the Dems a chance to shine some light in and clean up this mess.
The RBJ’s ranking this week lists out the highest-paid public officials, many of whom are in public schools. Coincidence?
I think this just shows how tight the majority party’s relationships are in this town…
3 more seats in the county legislature and this foolishness comes to an end.
[...] If this plan is so amazing, why wasn’t there more opportunity for public input and debate? It’s becase the county GOP, based on history, clearly doesn’t want input or debate. [...]
[...] Closed door backroom political deals are starting to irritate a lot of influental people. As a result, Republicans are losing the business community, traditionally one of their strongest areas of support in Monroe County. [...]
[...] mean it isn’t like we have not discussed how the lockstop, myopic and top down GOP runs Monroe [...]
[...] they’d put people over party, and listen, but their actions have shown, time and again, a complete unwillingness to listen to people. (Unless those people run the county party or are big donors to [...]
[...] is not new, like the closed-government methods the GOP has used to ram through legislation such as the F.A.I.R. plan, this kind of thing has been going on for several years [...]
[...] It caught on here at RT months ago, as ladkiddo pointed out yesterday. We’ve watched as the county GOP uses every procedural and power-grabbing measure possible to maintain their power and keep government behind closed doors. It’s standard operating procedure for them. [...]