“Also speaking during the forum were the remaining candidates for Kissimmee Commission seat 1...Due to time constraints, none of the last three candidates were asked any questions.” (Osceola News-Gazette, 9/20/08)
Leading up to the August city election, the news media could hardly be bothered to provide any coverage of the city candidates. This lethargy spilled right over to the 10% of registered voters, or about 5% of the city population, that could be bothered to go out and vote. Now, with one runoff election remaining, it appears that even the political junkies that would typically attend an event like the League of Women Voters forum can’t be bothered to care about asking questions of city political candidates. Instead, they tend to focus on issues like Destiny, a plot of land where no one currently lives, and at least according to some opinions, no one will live even after it is built out with new housing units.
And with all of this voter apathy, we are still amazed when the city commission spends all of their time on issues like lengthening severance packages (to ward off “commission zombies”), seeking empty awards (how’s that economic development marketing campaign going, commissioners?), and continuing to hope that some day the county will turn over the underutilized Beaumont complex for mixed-use development (oh, by the way, how’s the plan for the underutilized Hansel plant/city storage center coming?)
We surmise that the voter apathy over city issues is because the city commission’s focus and actions are no longer relevant to most of the residents of the city. While the campaign to combine various city and county departments or services appears to continue to have a hard time getting out of the starting gate, we think that, right now, if someone were to propose to combine city and county government, they might be surprised by the amount of support they might receive.
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So what's the answer? tHE cITY cOMMISSION APPEARS TO BE MANAGED BY dURBIN. tHEY OFFER NO SOLUTIONS AND SEEM UNABLE TO LOOK FOR SMOKE BUT REACT VERY SLOWLY TO FIRE. gRIEB IS THE INVISIBLE COMMISSIONER (LIKE BILL lANE, sWAN IS A BULLY THAT WANTS IT ALL DONE HIS WAY (WILL HE VOTE WHEN Waste Mgt comes up for contract renewal?)Gemskie is totally power hungry and makes motions and votes away taxpayer money on items not on the agenda,Irizarry? He has changed and now is practicisng Silent Cal govt. But what is really sad is the 5% of voters that showed up and keeps these people in office. Matbe someone could MAKE the commiss hold primaries with the rest of the country. Never happen until we get some "ROGUE" commissioners.
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