The Weekend Report
After a Friday night of heavy indulgence with friends and chasing after someone I’ve had a major thing for forever, you’d think I’d spend the following Saturday morning recovering, but no. Instead I went to the Marion County Alliance of Neighborhood Associations monthly meeting. Nearly two dozen candidates for the City-County Council showed up to answer questions and let the crowd know why they were running.
For the most part everyone did ok. Crime was the big issue and everyone agreed it was out of control and needed to be addressed. While most of the approaches were the same, more police and early intervention. There were some new comers with interesting ideas. I was particularly impressed with District Four candidate Christine Scales suggestion that interest from the Township fund balances be used to pay for extra police patrols in the township areas. I thought it was a very innovative idea and the type of out of the box thinking this county could use. And it would also give the Trustees some real work to do.
While I did agree in principle with those candidates who said jobs were important, I have never fully subscribed to the theory that poverty causes crime. There are a lot of poor people in this world who would never think of harming another person. And most of the people committing the crimes in Marion County aren’t Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to support their families. They are bad people who need to be locked up and put away.
However, I guess my biggest eyebrow rising moment came when City-County Council Vice President Joanne Sanders said she would fight crime by making sure ex-offenders had jobs to go to. A position that makes sense, no doubt, however when that subject came up last year and a proposal was before the council (Proposal 97 sponsored by Ike Randolph), Sanders and her party tabled the measure saying it needed more study. To date I haven’t seen anything show up on the council floor that would bring that measure back up.
Like I said, overall it was an interesting meeting. The biggest point of contention in the meeting was when one member of the audience asked on a note card how well the candidates thought Monroe Gray was doing as Council President, that raised a bit of a stir and caused some bickering. I’m glad I convinced someone to slip it in the stack.
