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Looking back at city's timeline
To the editor:
Just one more time, for the record, to make sure I have the sequence of events correct.
Our past mayor fires the water department manager and the City Council "forces" him to take the additional pay. Then, unexplained expenditures of water department money are made, and then the City Council votes to give the mayor 50 percent retirement after 10 years (our city councilman at the time who obviously doesn't have a college degree stated the reason was the mayor had a college degree; lots of teachers, doctors, lawyers and other college graduates would like to get in on that).
After all the transfers from the water department, funds for necessary repairs were not available, so we pay monthly to cover the repairs.
The little debacle with the IRS pops up, the city owes the county jail about half a million and the landfill for an unknown (to me) unpaid charge. Just for kicks, the industrial development fund, which was supposed to recruit new industry, has the last in a line of airport businesses on life support and something like $6 million has been sunk into the hospital system according to the news in the Blytheville Courier.
So now we are paying retirement to the past mayor, trying to appease the IRS, paying to repair our water system, at the same time trying to keep 60 jobs instead of the 600 promised at the old air base and keeping the hospital alive after Baptist Health Care was smart enough to leave at a propitious time considering the county requirements.
Not to mention all of the new schools that are being built in a time of serious population loss.
It sounds to me if we had all the crooks in this town in jail we would owe the county a lot more than we do now.