An interesting campaign mailer arrived in our mailbox just a little while back from our good friend, to coin a line from Jay Wheeler, Jerry Gemskie. Besides gloating over the 2008 All America City award that has only seemed to fill incumbent candidates with pride, is his claim that he is the anti-graffiti commissioner. We did not know that we had a Graffiti Czar in the city, but with the way meetings are run and secret agenda items, anything is possible. The WayneWho staff decided it would be fun to take a quick drive around the area just to see if we have less graffiti now than we did before the creation of the Graffiti Czar position.Nope.
There is more graffiti now that we can remember at any time in our city's past. Based on conversations with some of our friends over at the Kissimmee Police Department, much of the new graffiti is related to actual gangs and is not the harmless prank graffiti that we have had before. It would appear that our anti-graffiti commissioner, Graffiti Czar as we like to call him, is losing the war on graffiti.
One place that we found graffiti was on the new mobile home park the CRA built in downtown Kissimmee. The trailer housing project which was touted as a great redevelopment success, based on the sign they put in front of the trailers, has already been tagged (for us older folks, that means that the sign on Patrick Street has graffiti all over it). With multiple requests already made to remove the sign or at least clean up the graffiti, the Graffiti Czar has remained powerless to do anything about it and nothing has been done.
We have to wonder if this campaign claim is false, what other claims on Mr. Gemskie's mailer are false? How about the promise to be a full time commissioner, which is not a requirement for being a commissioner to start with. How can you be a full time commissioner when so much time is spent traveling abroad going to conferences that do very little to improve services to the public? Maybe if Mr. Gemskie spent more time in town, he would notice the graffiti problem that we have to deal with. Hail to the Czar.
2 comments:
A mailer with no truth? Isn't that what campaign mailers are anyway? Maybe, just maybe, if Gemskie spent time out of durbin's office with Jim Swan, he would have a chance to see what's going on. Ask him next time you see him at Lanier's. That's his coffee hang out.
That is right out of the "we couldn't say it on TV unless it was true" scheme of advertising. But most people won't look beyond the statement anyway.
More important is, why should any elected official or candidate have this in their top 10 list of things they would work on? Isn't this much like saying "someone robbing your house? call me and I'll take care of it." We pay tax dollars to have city staff and a telephone system to take these kind of reports. We need our elected officials to be working on the big problems.
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