Gainesville Citizens Demand Resignation of Mayor Lauren Poe

Mayor Poe Fails to Protect Public Interest With Unbridled Debt

In Draconian Move, City Plans to Hide Commission Emails and Public Records

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By Ray Washington / Special to The Sun

That citizen commentators should be civil in their discourse is a bromide with which few, if any, legitimate participants in this community’s political discourse would take issue.

Ninety-nine percent of the citizen comments made before the Gainesville City Commission are civil. The mayor’s and certain commissioners’ continued focus on relatively rare acts of incivility is a follow-up to a month-old red herring dragged behind a stalking horse in front of a trial balloon.

Every meeting of any board, commission, agency or authority of a municipality should be a marketplace of ideas, so that the governmental agency may have sufficient input from the citizens who are going to be affected by the subsequent action of the municipality.

No governmental board is infallible, and it is foolish to assume that those who are elected or appointed to office have any superior knowledge concerning any governmental problem.

It has been painful to watch Mayor Lauren Poe, as public dissent rises, attempting to silence and demonize good people trying to have a public discussion about how best to deal with the fiscal disaster bequeathed to their community by his and former Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan’s billion-dollar biomass debt boondoggle.

It also has been painful to watch members of Poe’s current City Commission cohort aiding, abetting, facilitating and initiating yet another commission scheme of information suppression and accountability avoidance.

Commissioners July 18 either approved or raised no objection to Poe-ordered police expulsions from City Commission of two 70-year-old women following expressions of dissatisfaction with commission-condoned tactics at a meeting in which commissioners approved unprecedented tax hikes and electric rate increases.

Commissioners earlier had blocked public access to their most current and unprecedentedly problematic audited financial reports. Before that commissioners without cause had fired the city’s internal auditor following his repeated warnings of internal control deficiencies and unaddressed looming risks.

Expect more ham-fisted commission schemes that stifle public inquiry and communication seven years after the Hanrahan-Poe biomass plant began belching carbon and sucking cash out of the Gainesville economy,

Aug. 8 commissioners are expected to unveil a scheme to impose even more limitations on the public’s ability to make inquiry and offer comments at commission meetings. Most commissioners already have suggested these attempts to limit citizen participation in City Commission meetings are not sufficiently robust and do not go nearly far enough.

Ray Washington is an attorney and Gainesville resident.

https://www.gainesville.com/opinion/20190729/ray-washington-commission-trying-to-avoid-accountability