Editorial: City should put the focus on progress

What do you expect from your city? Stop and think about that for a moment. As a community, where do we really want our elected officials to focus their energies?

The Clarendon Board of Aldermen last week spent a lot of time arguing over the authority of the city administrator – something we went through nearly a decade ago – and delving into the minutia of city business, discussing the finer points of when employees should take breaks and whether employees should be allowed to smoke on the job.

Considerable attention was given over to the per diem allowance that regular employees are allowed compared to the administrator’s expense account when he travels. In short, employees get $40 per day and Mr. Little had a receipt for $65 that covered two meals at a conference. (Of course, if you’ve been to a professional conference or convention, you know that meals of $20 to $35 are the order of the day and not at all unusual). But nevertheless, the aldermen found themselves caught up in a discussion over a tiny amount in a million dollar budget.

Attention to detail is one thing, micro-managing and second-guessing every decision that the administrator is making is quite another. No one can work efficiently if someone is breathing down his or her neck all the time.

The board also got into a discussion about a perception in the community that the city is broke. How can this be, they wondered aloud, when we have money in reserves? Perhaps it is because during the recent budget workshops, members of the board acted like the city was spending way too much money and just cut and cut and cut instead of making investments to improve our town.

They turned down a modest tax increase after public comments about what such an increase might do to senior citizens and the disabled, and yet both of those groups have their taxes frozen. Instead they raised sanitation rates on everyone in the city – including churches and non-profits. How much sense does that make?

The City of Clarendon has some very real issues, and they haven’t changed much in two decades. We need serious street repairs and our aging water and sewer system needs to be largely replaced. Pot holes and brown water – not the administrator’s expense account – are the recurring top complaints of citizens. We have dilapidated buildings and code violations and a whole host of other issues facing us, but we are focused on trivial issues and making no progress on the big picture.

Despite disagreements, your editor believes that we’ve got good people working for us on the city council, but they need to hear from the citizens about what is most important to them. To that end, we need more people to attend our city meetings to see for themselves what the discussion is. We’re stuck in a quagmire of minor issues right now, but with a little nudge the people can re-focus the city on big issues and move us forward.

That is not to say that we want them to pay no attention to the money or give the administrator total control. But we do expect to see the city run professionally and we want to see results on the major problems that are holding our town back. There is no standing still at this point. We either move forward, or we move backward. And we have to trust our city leaders to take us down the right path.