Off The Air

Tonight the City of Kissimmee Commission has three very important discussion items on its agenda. We have no doubt that by the end of the meeting some sort of comical keystone cop event will have happened distracting the commission from these issues, but regardless the items are on the agenda. We have been told by reliable sources that tonight's meeting is not the Pay Per View event we have been waiting on, but we expect it to be fun anyway.

The discussion items tonight start with a discussion on the future of Access Osceola. Basically the commission is faced with either reducing staffing and costs, or shutting down the entire project. We believe that shutting down Access Osceola would be a mistake. Scaling it back to its original intent is appropriate. If other funding partners are not going to help to fund the station, then their roll needs to be eliminated from the channel. Access Osceola was intended to help government remain transparent. It was not created so the PIO could have their own talk show. Go back to the slides, we miss those.

The second discussion item is on funding for a legislative lobbyist. This should be cut from the budget. Year after year the lobbyist details the issues they will go to the state and fight for, not the commission, and year after year we see little benefit from the money spent. Developers are the only ones who seem to benefit from the lobbyist efforts on our dime, so we do not see why this should continue.

The final discussion will be the most painful, but the most important. The city will be discussing a layoff policy. We feel that this policy should have been addressed much sooner than this and find it odd that a discussion on All America City came first. Discussion of this policy brings to light another discussion that needs to happen, how did government expand to this level, and why? Were past commissions not paying attention, or did they just believe that everything staff brought forward should be automatically approved? This commission must set the tone as policy makers for future commissions to follow.

We would ask one favor of the Access Osceola crew tonight, make sure if a fight breaks out you keep broadcasting. And if possible, put up the colors of the boxers trunks so we can tell who is who.