The Nerk Informer

Here are the minutes of last week's finance committee meeting and the agenda for tonight's council meeting. Also, the school board meeting from last week is not yet available (in video or written form) for public review via the school board website.

A few notes from last week: for starters, during the finance committee meeting, Chairman Marmie saw fit to comment - almost out of nowhere - on his desire to revive the highly-controversial debate over part-time firefighters. Interestingly, the new contract between our firefighters and the city is about to be negotiated this month. My prediction is this, the tax levy - which I haven't seen the Hall Administration promote at all (just as was the case with the previous levy they offered) - is going to fail, although we are in desperate need of the revenue to deal with serious infrastructure needs. Then, after said failure I fully expect Mayor Hall and his supporters on Council to argue something along the lines of "well, we tried to pass a tax levy, but now we have to make some serious changes to find the money elsewhere". At that point, you will see them attempt to create the groundswell for adopting part-time firefighters in order to "save money".

Secondly, when I went to the School Board meeting, the atmosphere was much friendlier than the last time. They were joking with me and were kind. It was pleasant, to say the least. At the beginning of the meeting, a few members of the Hall Administration were dispatched to try and win the Board's cooperation in securing a TIF for the new Kroger Marketplace. I was pleased to see that the Board was hesitant to do so, and they exhibited a healthy skepticism about what this deal could do to benefit our students. I will be keeping an eye on this over the coming months, for sure.

Until next time...