Some of you do not understand why council wants to hold secret meetings and executive sessions. They do not want you to know about, nor record, their corruption, lack of honesty and integrity, and violations of law and our charter (our constitution). If I planned on being dishonest, I would want to hide the meetings from the public too. Anyone saying that it is awkward to discuss the people’s business in public, should have thought about what being a council member meant.

A few thoughts about the last few years:

1. Remember when our crooks were caught recording conversations between prisoners and their attorneys?

The conversations were illegally used in our kangaroo court to prosecute those prisoners. This was a conspiracy to commit many felonies (civil rights violations). This conspiracy involved the police dept. and jail (run by the police dept.), the law office, prosecutor, the court and others (in my opinion). No-one has been held responsible even though the city has been sued. We have heard of none of this because lawsuits can be discussed in executive sessions. But our council and administration keep it secret even after it should be made public. I believe that we are paying millions of dollars a year to settle these lawsuits (because our insurance won’t cover civil rights violations and if they went to court some of our “fine people in the city building” might end up in prison). Did you ever wonder why our so called “leaders” will stoop to any level to steal our money, have the highest taxes, red light cameras (with illegally short yellow light timing causing an entrapment situation), put anything (even if it is illegal) on our water bills, put minimum fines on the least thing and have either skimmed or stolen all or part of the money out of every fund the city has, yet refuse to repair our streets (unless you are willing to pay for them the third time or unless they can charge you $11,400 like they are going to do on Lefferson Road ), refuse to maintain our cemetery or repair the vault, refuse to maintain our parks or open our swimming pool, and on and on and on? Where does the money go? I believe much of it goes to these and many other lawsuits against the city and to pay the nearly 400 people that get a city paycheck. None of the promised cuts and they are still adding employees. But don’t forget that our city government always wants to reward failure and to keep the above mentioned felons making top dollar so they can live like kings while us tax payers have to pay off the mess they created.

Voice of Reason, you ask “Specifically to what dishonesty and by whom are you referring?”

I thought I had made that clear in the first line under #1. “Remember when our crooks were caught recording conversations between prisoners and their attorneys?” I do not know whether you have not heard of these recordings or weather you do not believe that violating the constitutional attorney/client privilege is a crime? I thought that everyone that had their head out of the sand had heard about the illegal recordings.

I noticed Spiderjohn mentioned them in another post.

As to the who, I believe that anyone involved in asking that the recordings be made, making the recordings, giving the recordings to the prosecutor, using the illegally obtained information in our courts or allowing the use of these recordings are all responsible and should be prosecuted under the Rico statutes as organized crimes. I believe that violating someone’s constitutional rights is a felony, therefore anyone involved in intentionally committing a felony is a felon. This was not a small oversight or a minor mistake, this was a planned conspiracy to violate the attorney/client privilege and use illegally obtained information in the prosecution of people in our court. I may not have a clear mind, but this corruption doesn’t take the clearest mind to see. All you have to do is pull your head out of the sand.

I agree that personnel cost eat up far too much money. The City has nearly 400 employees with police and firemen making up only about 164 of those employees. As for the source for the city adding employees, look in the paper’s want ads to see the ad for an Administrative Assistant for Public Works. Recently I thought the city added an assistant for Mr. Atkins.

My source about the payoffs is based on the six figure check that the city sent to some attorneys handling some of these cases. (This came out in the paper before it got bottled up in executive session.) I also heard from reliable sources that there was many large lawsuits file against the city, especially by people that had been convicted using illegally obtained information and got jail time or large fines. With all of the attorneys involved, I don’t think we got off easy. But we will never know, because the city will pay rather than go to trial and it will all be hidden in their secret meetings.