Alerts: Obama, Council rules, Mr. Kidd, Channel 19

Don’t ever believe President Obama isn’t giving the Newark Tea Party a serious read. Two days ago I wrote about Newark’s lack of jobs Newark Remains Unstimulated

Today’s Washington Post headline: “Obama to focus on job growth in Ohio.” Ta Da!

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Rules are for suckers - Right, City Council?
Ohio law requires three readings of proposed legislation, Newark by virtue of its “home rule” Charter requires but two. Many ordinances, however, are passed on the first reading because they are claimed to be “emergencies” though exactly what the “emergency” is normally remains murky at best. Never mind the Charter requires Council to “clearly specify the necessity of the emergency.”

Also, Council again played fast and loose with the public money entrusted to it when it awarded without competitive bidding a contract to Claggett & Sons to work on the company’s own property.

Competitive bidding for projects of $25,000 or more is required by the Charter, but this routinely is defined as unnecessary by the votes of six Council members. The Claggett project is estimated at $35,000-$50,000.

Claggett is a good landscaping contractor who has performed perfectly on a couple small jobs for me, and would be my choice for the next one. Likely the city won’t go wrong by awarding this job to Claggett. But we’ll never know because the rules don’t apply here.

This points to the need for tighter rules to ensure that expediency and convenience stop being overriding objectives of Council members and the Council president. Those tighter rules could be a project of a Charter Review if Council would provide for it.

Meantime, if any citizen should feel Council is abusing bidding requirements a complaint should be filed with Mary Taylor, Auditor of State.

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Keep your eye on Mr. Kidd
Ronnie Kidd, the Heath resident who led the charge against Reflex traffic cameras, hasn’t retired. For one thing, he was a key player in Mansfield’s decision to ignore Redflex’s pitch to install cameras in that city. Here’s how he described some of it in a note to me 1/20/10:

“Last night I drove to Mansfield for its Safety Committee meeting, Caucus and Council meeting. The 3rd reading of its camera ordinance was planned. Only one Mansfield resident was there to protest the cameras. The same Redflex rep that did the Zanesville presentation was there to give a slick and gruesome presentation. Including once when a Council member called me to the podium to ask me some questions, I managed to address the Council 4 times. Vote: 8-0 unanimous against the cameras.”

His group of citizens who helped with the traffic camera exile is still meeting. They hope to help citizens of Baytown TX and Arnold MO battle red light cameras. Also, they are expecting to influence decisions by local officials on the county dog pound, the Davis-Shai House and the Rt. 79 median in Heath.

I think this group isn’t far from announcing some sort of formal organization and picking up speed as a very influential force which politicians will rapidly come to respect.

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Webcasts & Channel 19
I was confused by the Advocate report on Council’s discussion of a camera for webcasting meetings on the city’s website. It was my sloppy reading, not the reporter’s fault. Maybe there were others too who didn’t get the difference between webcasting (something new being considered) and cablecasting (what’s already being done on Channel 19). The discussion involved, in part, the cost of a camera for webcasts. City officials were told the cost would be $2,800, but a resident brought an inexpensive digital video camera to demonstrate its adequacy and simplicity. Now let’s see if anyone listens to him.

Speaking of cablecasts on Channel 19, it seems to me that they are more professionally produced now than they have been for many years. Also, that Newark Schools’ Channel 19 has a lot more and a lot better programming in quality and subject matter.

Thing is, if you don’t know when Council meetings are to be shown, and if you don’t know when the other stuff is on, what good is it? Seems to me that the Advocate could easily list Channel 19 programming, if only on its web site.

Green jobs are coming - whatever they may be

“Green” is to be adored these days, so it’s little wonder that “green jobs” are to be revered and they are coming at us.

If you’re a working stiff, you should want one; if you’re a government grunt or an entrepreneur you should want to provide them. It’s the thing to do because, for one thing, it appears the force of Obama will be behind you.

There’s something new called “The Middle Class Task Force” and that’s a catchy name. “Middle class,” is almost as good as “green,” now that the Republicans have been sidelined.

So when it came up this morning on the White House Blog I followed the link from there to the page about it’s meeting 2/27/09 in Philadelphia because it said, these folks were trying to “figure out how to make sure that our recovery from the current economic crisis benefits the middle class.”

The links on that page will provide an interesting read to anyone who wants to look into the future and learn about the forces beginning to take hold.

You can read the Task Force's first full report. If you do, you may be struck, as was I, with the realization that nobody knows what a green job is. In fact, the report itself says “There is no official or even widely-accepted definition of what constitutes a green job. This is not necessarily a disadvantage, as we seek to provide a broad, ‘lay-of-the-land’ survey in this report. However, to have a coherent discussion about green jobs, we need to define some characteristics that broadly define them.”

No matter what they turn out to be, we’re going to have them - because, by golly, America is now green and middle-class.