Amen! Bring it on! Bruce Smith, editor of the Yakima Valley Business Times needs to go a step further. Hold councilmember’s accountable who claim the city doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem. Their rhetoric sounds more like campaign pablum rather than leadership they should be displaying in a non-partisan fashion.
Two of the Three Amigos (Bill Lover and Rick Ensey) are glorified in Smith’s April 11, 2008 editorial. Smith overlooks the fact Bill Lover has accomplished virtually nothing in 2 plus years on the council, and has never produced much promised extra money to meet the needs of the council’s number one priority – Public Safety. Smith falls all over himself gushing that Lover was once an employee of Boeing. (In Smith’s ever shrinking mind, that must make Lover an expert!). Lover profoundly states that Boeing is a company constantly looking for a better way to do things. DUH!
I welcome an independent, objective performance audit of the city and I even believe they may indeed find some small efficiency to cover the cost. What happens after the audit? It’s my guess the 3 amigos will not believe anything objective if it doesn’t fit in with their ideology of less government and less taxes. Even though they have never provided us with clear examples of how they would achieve these elusive goals.
We’ll be watching to see if the Amigos continue to sit on their hands and do nothing while waiting for an audit. Remember, we are expecting the Amigos to find enough of the money that they claim is laying around city hall to hire the extra police needed to meet the number one priority of the city council – Public Safety. Expectations for this to happen seem to be quite low. Otherwise you’d hear about it at least once in a while on KIT radio. There is a strange silence among the pundits about the failure to achieve the goal of more police. Of course holding their little darlings accountable would mean their cheerleader status would be diminished.