After the Fire

As far as I know, it's still standing. KC City Hall in one of my photos.

Well, I've been wandering around the internets, reading entries and comments on the events of yesterday afternoon concerning the government of this fair city. I would come to the conclusion that the community--at least the parts of it that read blogs and make comments--are glad to see Wayne Cauthen out the door. Some think that it was good for Mayor Funkhouser, and some think it was a "palace coup" to borrow the phase from John Sharp. (Mr. Sharp looked so relaxed at the Southern Communities Coalition meeting on Wednesday night. Little did we all know...) It will be interesting to see how Troy Schulte does in the post, since this is the man who helped financially justify the MAST merger with KCFD with some sort of bunch of numbers. Will he be a "yes man" for the Mayor and a way for him to add power to his weak (per the city charter) office, or someone who will take leadership in these difficult times?

The other thing that will be interesting is to see where the political fall out falls. Does it fall on the council members whose votes enabled Funky to show Cauthen the door (for the record, Hermann, Skaggs, Johnson, Circo, Gottstein, and Marcason voted in the way to help Funky suspend Cauthen) or does the people's election day wrath fall on those who voted in such a way as to continue to retain Cauthen in his post (again for the record Riley, Sharp, Jolly, Curls, Sanders-Brooks and Ford were against suspending Cauthen.).

Either way you shake it, the government of this city is a mess, the post with the most power is now manned by a neophyte, and the Mayor and City Council are not well regarded by most of the population. I am still both amazed and amused by the riffs the little old Black ladies at the very first meeting about MAST did on how much they DO NOT expect from city government. Their expectation was that the government will find a way to mess something up. I sometimes think that the only reason things just don't fall apart completely is because the people doing the actual work of making the city go and serving the people are very dedicated, generally love their jobs and helping people and ignore the machinations at the really tall building downtown. If they ever stop working as hard as they do, we'll all be in the soup big time. In the future, I am afraid that when the budget needs balancing (which it will), it will be on the backs of these good folks, and both they and the city's services will suffer.