OK, this is another column with a soundtrack. Crank it up and read along:
How long can a bell ring?
Just as long as it knows its tone
Just as long as it knows its tone
I’m here to tell you that’s how long
That a fool can go wrong
Sounds like quite a meeting at City Council last night. Although I still don’t think that last night’s two-step move to zero out budget lines for the Office of the Mayor for the remainder of our current fiscal year ending June 30, and introduce an ordinance to permanently cut the annual salary of the Mayor by a third (from $126,000 to $80,000 per annum) was the wisest action that Council could take right now, I have to admit that the move has had the effect of singularly focusing attention on the main failing of the Administration of Mayor Tony F. Mack.
“We have unqualified personnel overseeing large and important projects and we have unqualified personnel running departments,” North Ward Councilwoman Marge Caldwell-Wilson said last night, as quoted in Matt Fair’s piece in the Times today (a very cogent story about very complex budget issues and processes, nicely done to what had to have been a tough deadline!). The Councilwoman hit that square on the nose. I would add there are several “aides” working in the Mayor’s office with questionable job descriptions (if any) and on irregular clocks. They need to go, too.
I have long argued that many of the “unqualified personnel running departments” have been doing so far in excess of the 90-day window authorized by our city laws. I have wanted them dismissed on that basis alone. Council has chosen to use the tool of de-funding their positions. A blunter tool, in my opinion, but one that has the apparent advantage of being effectively wielded by a simple four-person majority rather than a veto-proof five. So that’s the way Council is going for now. However, an ordinance to permanently change the Mayor’s salary is subject to his veto, and a five-member coalition to override that veto is simply not there.
The measures last night seem to have been well-planned and considered. The four members of Council who backed them – Caldwell-Wilson, Chester, Holly-Ward, and Muschal – managed some deft parliamentary procedure and good budgetary gamesmanship. This tells me that after close to two years on the job, these four at least are getting their game on. Good for them.
How long can a bird sing?
Just as long as it knows its song
(spoken): You gotta know your songHow long can a bird sing?
Just as long as it knows its song
See I’m here to tell you that’s how long
that a fool can go wrong
I still think that Council’s exertions would be better off going elsewhere. The life of the City goes on, ever more precariously. Ominous goings-on in the Fire Department this week about “rolling firehouse closures” provide some evidence that TFD is on the knife’s edge: the end of the current SAFER grant looms in the next year, a grant that saved 61 firefighters’ jobs right before their scheduled layoffs a year ago. There is still a year to go in that grant, but now is the time the City has to be thinking about how to keep those jobs when the Federal money goes. Talk of “rolling” closures now doesn’t sound good; what happens next year?
The City has been on the losing end of several Court decisions recently, costing taxpayers a lot of money. Superior Court Judge Paul Innes awarded a developer nearly $8 Million in lost rent and damages due to Mayor Mack’s 2010 unilateral cancellation of a 20-year lease of a closed West Ward grocery store at the Westside Plaza on Hermitage Avenue. The lease had been signed by former Mayor Doug Palmer, and the store was to have been converted into use as the City’s Municipal Court. An unrealistic plan in retrospect, perhaps, but Mack’s rush to cancel the deal outright rather than negotiate a mutually agreeable exit from the deal is likely to cost us Millions.
Another Superior Court Judge, Linda Feinberg, ruled a while ago that that the City had violated state civil service laws and the city’s own collective bargaining agreement with Firefighters by failing to promote 14 members of the TFD to the jobs they had been filling – and being paid for – on an acting basis for months. This week, the 14 observed their formal promotions in a ceremony notable for not being performed, as these usually are, at City Hall.
And yet one more Superior Court Judge, Darlene Pereksta ordered the City to pay police officers $156,000 in back wages. This case also dates back to the Palmer Administration and former (yet un-mourned) Police Director Joe Santiago. Last year, the State Supreme Court ruled the cops were entitled to the money, but for some reason the City has dragged its heels. Yes, this case was due to a Palmer Administration policy, but the Mack Administration has been blissfully dismissive of what the Courts have been telling them.
The Administration is not having a very good run in the Courts. It hasn’t since Mayor Mack took office. Knowing of several other cases working their way through the Courts, and the City’s poor position in many of them, that’s not likely to change.
There are a lot of other things going on in town, too many to go into in detail here – a crime situation that still simmers hot even though it’s gone off the boil since County deputies and State troopers have come to the City’s aid; continuing nagging inabilities to fill vacancies in positions as varied as Plumbing Inspectors and Museum Directors; and a dismal economic development climate as symbolized in my own neighborhood by the ghost-town-like nearly empty Westside Plaza and the Mercer Campus of Capital Health System. And this bleak development environment in our town persists while the Mayor pursues his fantasy of Big International Investors swooping into town to create new businesses and hundreds of jobs; most recently on February 16 when this Chinese delegation visited to talk with Mayor Mack, no doubt about a factory to manufacture iPhones at the old Roebling factory, right?
All of the above problems, to me, have one thing in common: consistently bad policy decisions – or no decision – made by Tony Mack and those around him. From his first weeks in office, he has been like this. The price tag to his ongoing, never-ending follies keeps getting higher and higher.
Council’s move last night at least attempts to rein him in, which I applaud even though I doubt how effective a move it may be. But the efforts by those four Council members at least show their hearts are in the right place.
I learned my lessons from people
You know in all walks of life
You know in all walks of life
I know if a person mistreats you once they’re
bound to misuse you twice(That’s why I said) how long can a bell ring?
Just as long as it knows its song
Just as long as it knows its song
I’m here to tell you that’s how long
I wish Council eventual luck in its attempts to rein in and hopefully undo some of the worst mistakes of Tony Mack and his people. Because left to his own devices, how long CAN a Fool Go Wrong?
Too damned long.
Tony Mack can go on as long as it takes for him to personally and single-handedly to bring Trenton back to life, as his sycophants say. Or as long as it takes to finish off the rest of Trenton that crime, drugs, gangs, and the previous administration haven’t already destroyed.