Joe Kelley has posted his thoughts on why he is opposed to the renewal of the County's sales tax packages. Set for a vote tomorrow (Dec. 13), Kelley says he opposes any increase in taxes until such time that the elected officials prove they have cut everywhere they can. [You can read his blog posting here.]
I tried to respond to him using the comments feature on his site, but was told that I had a "Comment Submission Error." Why? Apparently "due to questionable content."
So, I'm posting my response here. Read it thoroughly and tell me if you can guess what the questionable content might be. This is your chance to join the list of they hyper-critical, giving you full license to not only disagree with my message, but also my spelling and punctuation.
Joe,
While I strongly agree with you in general, I have spent the past three Summers pouring over our city's budget, trying to determine which basic services should be ended in order to balance our budget.
I've often said that if the city hadn't had its budget crisis, we'd have had to invent one, because it's the only way we've been able to get the city's beauracracy to seriously take a look at cutting costs. But at a certain point, you can cut so much fat that you begin to hit muscle.
We haven't been able to return pay cuts to city employees. We haven't been able to put water into the vast majority of the city's pools. We haven't been able to fund overtime for police officers searching for serial rapists. We haven't been able to fund code enforcement inspectors to keep our neighborhoods vital and safe.
Tulsa...the City of Tulsa...is in trouble. We need more police officers on the streets. We need to pay our officers a competitive wage to keep other cities from luring them away. We need street lights in high crime areas. We need community based policing to disuade crime before it happens. I wouldn't be pushing for a short-term use of any tax, if we didn't need to stop the bleeding of the last four years.
My proposal will be short lived. I will put renewal...if it is needed...back before the voters before my re-election bid...if wanted...in order to be answerable to the voters in delivering on my promises.
But we need change and need it fast. Tulsa is becoming unsafe to live, work or play.
7 comments:
Mr. Medlock, that link to his post is all messed up, man.
:)
The "questionable" content thing came up for me one time because I wrote in a certain word. it was really some obscure word, too. I can't remember what it was.
http://www.thesakeofargument.com/archives/001202.html
It is a very dumb filter. I believe that the word "rapist" is your questionable content.
It'd be nice if his site would just keep the comment and flag it for review by the Blogger before public posting.
His protection is over-sesnitive.
It eliminates words containing "exe", "inf", "com", etc.
Like "infrastructure", "community", "becomming" and "competitive".
You used three of those.
well, in his defense, comment spam can be a real pain in the blog sometimes...
Almost as painful as filling in a captcha form everytime I comment somewhere!
:)
"We need more police officers on the streets. We need to pay our officers a competitive wage to keep other cities from luring them away. We need street lights in high crime areas. We need community based policing to disuade crime before it happens."
I have no faith in the Tulsa Police Department. I called the Tulsa Police to report my mother suicidal. Gave them the tag number and vin number of her car. They took a report and did nothing. They thought she was sleeping in the WalMart parking lot and ignored her.
Again, my wife was ran off the road by a wrecker truck on the dangerous 75 loop. She smacked both walls of the bridge. She was 6 months pregnant. Who took her to the hospital? I did when I got home and saw the car sitting in the drive. The police officer said he didn't want to work the accident and would give my wife a ticket for hitting HIS wall. Not "Are you alright ma'am, do you need to go to the hospital?" She spent days in the hospital.
They have lost all of their compassion . They are reactive and not proactive. They would rather write tickets at traffic stops than find a suicidal womans vehicle in a public place.
I've always felt that TCSO deputies are nicer than TPD officers.
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