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| | Issue #20.48 :: 11/28/2007 - 12/04/2007 | The Homeless and the Gutless
Which is Worse: Waste or Incompetence
| BY KEVIN FISHER
| It’s difficult to say which is worse, the waste of tax money or the willful incompetence. Let’s start with the waste of tax money.
Columbia City Council has now spent some $2 million of your tax dollars doing absolutely nothing to improve the city’s homeless problem. While a sum of that size could have done much to implement the Columbia Homeless Commission’s broad-based, carefully developed plan for addressing the issue, instead it has been thrown away on a series of last-minute, least-thought, no-vision actions that have ensued since the weak-kneed abandonment of that commission’s work in 2006.
The weakest of all the knees on Council are of course those belonging to Mayor Bob Coble, a man who is surely the least influential five-term mayor in America. The sad part, for both him and the city, is that if he would step up and lead, I believe people would follow. They want problems addressed and they like the mayor personally — a recipe for success if he would rise to the challenge of leadership instead of hiding from it.
Unfortunately, when the Commission’s site selection for a homeless services center generated neighborhood opposition, the mayor — though he had championed the creation of the Commission and pledged to follow its recommendations — folded faster than Boy Scouts striking a pup tent.
This is a recurring problem, as “neighborhood opposition,” no matter what the neighborhood, is essentially a veto in Columbia’s weak-mayor, weak-council, weak-kneed system of government. While neighborhood organizations are always useful and often wise, they are also sometimes prone to overreaction and power trips.
Such was the case with opposition to the homeless services center site selection, the result of the work of a balanced and diverse Commission that labored long and hard only to see its work quickly marginalized in the midst of a council meeting that featured emotion over information and logic.
While a more skillful and disciplined set of politicians might have defused the situation (indeed, much of the problem originated with Council’s attempt to hold a short-notice hearing on the matter in a foolish attempt to push the plan through without discussion), Columbia City Council is not such a group. They immediately abandoned their own Homeless Commission, surrendered years of work to an hour of heated rhetoric and punted the homeless on down the road.
Specifically, on down to a road in the heart of the Congaree Vista (2006), then to another road adjacent to Riverfront Park and the new CanalSide development (2007). Talk about site selection …
Now for the willful incompetence. In doing all this punting around of the homeless, City Council has not only wasted $2 million on temporary shelters that do nothing to improve the situation, but did so after rejecting the state’s offer of a free, well located building on the State Mental Hospital site plus $750,00 in state funds to operate it. While that aspect of the story is too complex and too absurd to recount in this space, suffice to say it involved the mayor and council genuflecting before local developer and power broker Don Tomlin.
Put that lost money on top of the $2 million since spent and the budget swing on this issue is closing in on $3 million. It will in fact easily top that figure, both because Council’s project budgets have a habit of coming up short and because there is still no plan, no vision and no end in sight. Three million dollars is real money. Badly wasted, much-needed money.
Of course, it is not only taxpayers who suffer. The homeless also suffer, especially those who might have benefited from the homeless services center that should have been up and running long ago. The resources needed to get their lives back in order, at least for those who could, have been denied them by the ongoing lack of courage and competence demonstrated by Mayor Coble and City Council.
Fisher is president of Fisher Communications, a Columbia advertising and public relations firm. He is active in local issues involving the arts, conservation, business and politics. | |
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