Jonathan Morris
♦Mayor Woodson and the Salisbury City Council, your responsibility is to diligently attend to what goes on within your city government and especially with what goes on in the city manager’s office. A major crisis in leadership has taken place there and its drawn the attention of a great many people in Salisbury and the county. Mayor Woodson and the rest of the city council are responsible to supply some semblance of oversight. To many of us it appears you stayed too long in office and became lax in your duties, coasting for years, just showing up for photo opportunities, or glad handing folks at the occasional grand opening of a Burger King. Somehow in your ez rider mode, you’ve become heedless of Doug Paris’s behavior behind the doors of his city manager’s office. Surely you are not oblivious to the steady stream of legal judgments and settlements, some of them whopping sums the city had to pay with taxpayer money. You had to know about the sloppiness of these terminations and the mean-spiritedness in which some were handled. Long-time upper tier employees were rudely kicked to the curb via wrongful terminations, forced resignations, and “kangaroo court” evaluations–just bad treatment of long standing and hardworking employees.
Out here in the county, where many city employees live, word spread about the nasty goings on down there. Heck for several years now people were well acquainted with the baby-faced Fuhrer’s antics when he attempted to tangle with County Manager Gary Page over some numb headed thing and Gary was forced take out ads with his own money to defend his reputation against this very immature city manager. How about Paris offering the Rowan County Commission Chairman a dictionary? Didn’t that make you flinch?
Mr. Paris astounding feats with the truth defy gravity. It’s public knowledge he told a state senator and a local state rep that Fibrant would never dip into the city’s reserve funds when it already had. But I won’t go on about what he said about not dipping into the SKU funds of neighboring towns. Or Fibrant’s alleged astounding success.
And now so many former employees and even present ones are at odds with Mr. Paris’s special version of the “truth”. Dan Mikkelson, the former city engineer, questioned it. The much beloved Police Officer Kenny Lane is likely to receive the keys to Fort Knox and an armored vehicle to haul away his well-deserved payoff. Kenny Lane is supported by many thousands of people throughout Salisbury and the county–his work ethic and honesty are unimpeachable. The man passed a lie detector test with flying colors. Maybe they ought to hook up the baby-faced Fuhrer to such a device on the 4th of July and watch it set off a dazzling display of sparks. Oh and lest we forget those people who lost their jobs over in Parks and Recreation. And the many who remain silent because they signed off on settlements. Now Chris Borre, a water treatment specialist for the city, got demoted because he exercised his First Amendment rights and dared to criticize Fibrant and several other city pratfalls. Apparently the city doesn’t want it’s employees to exercise their constitutional rights. Very likely Chris will meet Kenny Lane at the gates of Fort Knox. Mr. Mayor and city council that’s big taxpayer money you’re forking over to cover up the baby-faced Fuhrer chronic messes. Give the boy the “Newsmaker of the Year” for 2013 too. Mayor anywhere else in the known universe they would call Mr. Paris’s activities a scandal.
Come on Mayor and city council what’s up? Surely you’ve noticed the flood of wrongful terminations and the mounting sums of money paid out. The bad treatment of honorable men and women who worked hard for the city. On this past Tuesday you heard from 3 people airing grievances at city council about the tasteless and vindictive firings conducted from the city manager’s office. You will no doubt hear from a lot more people before this crisis slows down. These people suffering wrongful terminations are utterly deserving of a full apology for this very dark period in the history of city hall. This is a scandal Mayor Woodson and city council and you are a major part of it for not knowing what was going on in the city manager’s office. The city employees treatment was disgusting, Everyday people hate to hear how Salisbury is involved in this sort of thing.
The City of Salisbury’s many scandals will be trotted out over and over in the fall campaign. You and city council will be reminded repeatedly about not only your total disregard of your employees well-being, honor and their questionable terminations, but of the monumental Fibrant debacle you hid through highly deceptive claims of roaring success. Meanwhile millions were gulped out of the city reserve funds, the certificates of participation were squandered on junk equipment and exhausted, and now the Fibrant debt climbs to above 73 million. You could hide these obvious failures with the help of the city’s other media up until recently when city employees dropped the dime on this “one hand washes the other” scheme. The city manager’s office pays out weighty sums for advertising and city notices to keep the “other media” on life supports after it lost its USA Today printing contract to Greensboro and the other media in turn keeps a city government alive with invaluable positive smokescreens, a parade of so-called successes, and press releases regurgitated into fluff pieces. Your own publicity mill–can’t beat it. A colony of two species of parasites preying on the public’s well-being and connected by a “golden cord”. How convenient. They say such parasitic colonies coexisted for each other’s mutual benefit in Cicero, Illinois during Prohibition when the media and the local government joined in common purposes and turned off the public’s protective searchlight. The traditional protector of the people and good government took a powder.
True believers downtown and in the historic districts are gradually falling away as city employees reveal what is going on. They are being affected too as programs dry up and the city’s very important services, such as the police and fire departments, attempt to do their duties understaffed. Meanwhile some sizeable badlands exist in the city and per capita violent crime statistics remain exceedingly high. You won’t hear much about this in the city’s other media or about the city’s gang menace.
Elsewhere in the city disenfranchised minorities feel unprotected and underserved and in some instances bullied by their protectors. The city has paid out handsome settlements for the latter reason. And over in the forcibly annexed areas people feel major malice toward the city for the inequitable exchange the forcibly annexed had to bare when they were forced to take duplicate services and pay out thousands for water lines to the curb. According to the city’s GIS stats many in forcibly annexed areas are simply unable to pay their city taxes.
At least four other very weighty issues will block city council’s return to office. One of the major ones is sitting in the city manager’s office and has ignited the ire of the city. And please the next time don’t conduct a charade of city manager search and waste $15,000 dollars when you knew all the while who your city manager would be. Too many skeletons in the closet to hide?
Mayor you and your city council need to do something about what is happening inside city hall and not wallpaper it over. Clean it up. Go outside this time and really heed the search.
