Welcome
to
– Formerly a City of
(A Satirical Memo from the Mayor – written by Ron
West)
My fellow majority council
members,
After my last memo to you, it
came to my attention that we may not be clearly stating our position to
potential new residents that might consider our fair city as a new home for
their families. New residents that lack
understanding of our rules and regulations may join the dissidents that create
so much grief for us. We need to use all
city publications to try to attract only those new residents that will either
not vote or will otherwise support the important changes we have in mind for
our city. The following items deserve to
our attention as we try to attract new residents to pay the taxes we require
for the future. newsletter to spell out some of our
important policies for such prospects.
1)
Wrong Slogan – I believe one of our first problems is our slogan –
“City
of
2)
Private Property in NRH – If someone is considering our city, they need to
understand that we just don’t consider property owners to have any rights. They need to understand that we already
have control of the front, side and back of all private property and we have
the power to regulate the rest. We also
already control what they can and cannot do in their homes. If we suspect they are doing something wrong,
we have demonstrated that we will take all measures necessary, honest or
otherwise, to knock down their doors and if necessary, even shoot them. Everyone needs to understand that we write
the laws and they have to abide by our decisions. If we want their property, we have the
ability to take it with our eminent domain proceedings. If any prospective resident is adamant that
they have any remaining property rights, maybe we should suggest that they
consider
3)
Citizen Input –
What an oxymoron! We have so much
knowledge with our current majority on the council supplemented by our hand
picked city staff members that we do not need any input from the citizens. I believe that we need to change our council
meetings to allow only 30 seconds of input from any citizens and such
presentations should be at the very end of any council meeting. We may all need to work harder even then on
showing just how disinterested we are in their presentations. We need to be even more careful in the future
picking only board appointees that will commit to rubber stamping our actions
without any public dissent. Citizen
input is just a waste of our valuable time.
Perhaps a notice in our city newsletter to advise residents to keep
their opinions to themselves or face “consequences” would be in order.
4)
City Voters
– After the last elections in our city, it is important that we work harder on
registering only those people who will vote for us. We need to make sure all city employees are
registered and that we “communicate” to them that their jobs will be in
jeopardy if they do not support us. Oh,
I know that we can’t put this in writing but we can direct the city manager to
place a few key phone calls to department heads to make sure the message is
communicated verbally. I would like to
commend our city attorney on the very confusing ballot wording for the senior
tax freeze but apparently we didn’t work hard enough on it. We need to make sure that any issue requiring
a vote in the future is so confusing that the voters will vote for our position
while thinking they are voting against it.
While not part of the voter issue, I would also like for the city staff
to work harder at encrypting the agenda for our council meetings. At least a few of our dumb citizens are
figuring out what we are voting on in council prior to the meetings. That just should not be tolerated. Lastly, please be sure when you are speaking
in council meetings to resident voters that you let them know how little they
understand. With all the new information
sources out there, a few are beginning to exhibit a dangerous level of real understanding.
5)
Taxes – We
need to get the message out that we know better how to spend our citizen’s
money than they do. We cannot afford to
waste the time studying budget issues due to constraints on income. We have been fortunate to have more than doubled
our tax income over the past 10 years and we need to double it again over the
next 7. Thanks to TAD valuations and our
careful raising of fees, a lot of new money is coming in. Unfortunately, a few of our businesses have
escaped to neighboring cities which will cause us to have to look for more
taxes from everyone. We also need to be
prepared for a significant increase in tax rates when we lose one or more of
the lawsuits pending against us. If
those dissidents are ever successful is unseating us, then they will have to
pay for all the suits we have postponed so far.
On the good side, we have convinced a few of our citizens to support our
spending habits and they are actually campaigning to help us take more money
from our citizens. (I did mention that
our voters aren’t too smart didn’t I?)
Would you believe that this group is discouraging others from really
looking at what we are spending? What a
deal!
6)
Desirable Residents – I know that some of you have worked hard and long to make it more
difficult for lower income folks to move into our city. I commend your efforts at raising the minimum
size of new houses in our city.
Unfortunately, these efforts have not been enough. We still have the area south of
7)
Taxes – We
want to be up front with any new prospective residents. We will not welcome them here because we like
or need them. We just want to spend the
new taxes they will provide to us. Don’t
expect new business development or even new sub-divisions to lower future
taxes. We have plans in writing to
increase property taxes every year for the next 10 years. We have also put out a lot of propaganda to
our residents to make them think that new business helps our city and leads
them to believe that such new business might even lower future taxes (which we
all know is not true.) Since we clearly
know what is best for our city, we rightfully keep all the new taxes we can
find and spend them without having to explain to the citizens. With this in mind, everyone needs to know
that we plan to increase the taxes and fees for everyone in our city as fast as
we can. We never have as much money to
spend as we want to spend.
8)
Laws We Make –
Citizens have given us the power to write any laws we wish to control all
actions in our city. Such laws are
called ordinances and we do not publicly publish or discuss them prior to their
approval. If any citizen dares to do
anything we don’t like we can write a new ordinance and make it retroactive to
zap them. Many of our ordinances have
been written in a cryptic manner so that we can broadly enforce anything we
wish. In plain English, we don’t
believe that anyone – except our illustrious city attorney – can figure out the
real laws of our city – so don’t try.
Just accept them and keep quiet.
9)
Closed Meetings
– If prospective new residents think that open meetings laws hamper our secret
actions in any manner, they should consider locating elsewhere. We have found numerous ways to make all
information on our actions very difficult to observe or find. We have worked hard to communicate with each
other on an individual basis so that open meetings laws do not apply to
us. Proof of our effectiveness is
demonstrated in our passage of all new ordinances without any public discussion
at all. Other cities are envious of our
power to deceive our residents and our effectiveness at keeping them in the
dark.
10) Beauty in
Our City – We alone reserve the right
to define what is and what is not beautiful in our city. Prospective new residents should not attempt
to sneak in any new boat or RV because we think they are eyesores. Check out our crooked sidewalks on Rufe Snow
drive. Drive through Hometown NRH and
see what our vision of the city should look like. Check out all the blank signs on businesses
in our city. We don’t like pole signs
and we don’t care if you can see any signs or not. We think pole signs are ugly just like all
RV’s and boats. We have committees that
judge the beauty of your property and we are trying to get rid of all the low
income housing in our city to make it more beautiful.
11)
Special Privileges - We reserve the right to offer special privileges and considerations to
our elected officials and city employees.
If they do anything wrong, they do not have to suffer the consequences
that an ordinary citizen would face. We
also stand behind any actions of any city employee or city official regardless
of whether they are illegal or not. We
firmly endorse the principal that we should directly benefit from our position
and power. We are ready to use the good
offices of our city attorney to defend any of our actions and have written a
contract with him that allows him to encourage and directly benefit from law
suits. The bottom line of NRH should be
“Don’t Mess With Us or We Will Squash You!”
With a clear understanding of this partial list of
our “requirements” by prospective new residents in our city where the
“Government Thinks For You”, we would welcome them to
Cordially,
What the Mayor would write if presenting
the “real” current situation in NRH!
(Reproduction
or re-publishing of this column is granted by the author.)
This is Part II of a series: Welcome
to
(Satirical Memos from the Mayor - written by Ron West)