Sniffing Glue
OK, I haven’t seen the minutes, but what the fuck, City Council? Monday (the 28th) I get an e-mail on Bob Jaffe’s city listserv from Bob Giordano (of the Missoula Institute for Sustainable Transportation) saying that the City Council tonight will take up the question of whether to adopt the 3-lane Broadway Vision Plan from Orange Street to Madison, so — get involved. The plan, as described, looks and sounds like something I can support. So I write a short e-mail to the Council saying yes I think it’s a good idea, pedestrian safety and forward-looking transportation are good for business, blah blah, I support this plan, thanks. Today I wake up to a Missoulian article saying, for starters, that Mayor John I Am Not In the Pocket of Business Honestly I Just Want What’s Best For Everybody Here Folks Engen opens up the debate by saying heh heh, look, everybody, I can assure you right now we are NOT gonna extend this “road diet” into downtown. I guess that’s the end of the debate. Or is it? Again, I haven’t seen the minutes. I only know what Keila Szpaller writes in the paper. So then, according to Keila’s article, a whole bunch (perhaps a small preponderance) of citizens stand up to speak on the issue, John Engen’s assurances notwithstanding, and say YES adopt the 3-lane Broadway Vision Plan, it’s a great plan, it’s what we need, go for it. Engen must’ve been all [eyes shifting right and left, laughing nervously] Hold on just a second everyone, we haven’t heard from [cough] the Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce! One lonely Chamber guy gets up and sites a “survey” showing that 78 percent of the Chamber members don’t support the plan. This must have surprised no one, as when has the Chamber ever supported anything involving public safety, the public interest, anything forward-looking, or anything that involves spending money. Councilman Wilkins, though, is not convinced by a survey. He wants the Chamber members (who, most of them, probably have golf league Monday nights?) to show up and make some noise about this in person. Why exactly this will make a big difference to Wilkins, who must already know the outcome, we can’t say. I would assume the survey is probably accurate enough. In any event, the measure is postponed to give the bidness community (along with the consultants at Crandall Arambula, et al.) time to get better organized. To change the subject, Councilman Strohmaier raises a new topic: there’s an out-dated glue-sniffing ordinance; he came across it in his winter reading. He wants it expunged from the books. The issue goes to a vote.
29 July, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I’d LOL at this, but I have a super-size tube of Super Glue stuck in my left nostril.
29 July, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Keila must have left out the part where Jon Wilkins pleaded with the West Broadway businesses – apparently at least one of them was sitting in the peanut gallery – to “get up and speak,” and “we really need to hear from you,” and “you can’t just sit there and not say anything,” and stuff like that.
Further, the lunacy of the removal of W. Broadway from the Northside-Westside Neighborhood Plan became even more apparent, as there was a lengthy amount of discussion on justifying it’s inclusion in the Downtown Master Plan.
Someone needs to, instead of putting this stuff on regular old Memorex tapes, get a $99 digital recorder. I got one – it’ll hold something like 92 hours of recording. Record this stuff and post it to archive.org or someplace like that….
30 July, 2008 at 8:13 am
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30 July, 2008 at 9:22 am
the masters have their masters.
1 August, 2008 at 11:31 pm
not that anyone will probably read this, but, as a fellow journalist who grew up in missoula, and in defense of Keila Szpaller’s reporting, people need to understand we work on deadlines…meaning, when a city council meeting gets out at 9 p.m., we usually have to scramble to write our stories in order to file them so they appear in the paper the next day…this means that journalists can’t always get bogged down in the minutiae that encompasses a city council meeting…we have to wade through a lot of shit, so to speak, to get to the focal point of the story…this equates to not being able to listen to an hour or two’s worth of the meeting in digital format!
yeah, it sucks we can’t write about every single thing that happened, but we really don’t have the time to do so. try it sometime on a deadline, when your job and livelihood depends on it, it ain’t as easy as you might think it is.
2 August, 2008 at 9:15 am
Thanks, venishka1, your point is well taken; however, it was not anyone’s intention (at this site) to criticize Keila’s reporting. We apologize if it came off that way.