By: Diane Benjamin
If you’ve been dying to learn all about Bloomington’s sewer system, this meeting was for you. Of course being a civil engineer would have helped understand it. The meeting was 2 hours and 28 minutes long, most of it was the presentation.
Mollie Ward’s Council initiative doesn’t happen until 2:09:55. According to City Code Council Initiatives have three options for Council to consider:
The Council was not allowed to consider Option #1 and Option #3. City Attorney Jeff Jurgens suggested making a motion, Ward charged ahead with committing staff time to come up with money to pay people. She called it their moral obligations as public servants. It is easy to commit other people’s money!
There was very little discussion as to whether it is the duty of taxpayers to pay the people who suffered damages, some with basement walls caved in. What happens if staff comes back and says it would be illegal for the City to hand out tax dollars to specific individuals? The vote went Molly’s way with Jamie Mathy joined the social justice warriors (Ward, Emig, Crabill, Carrillo)
There are non-profits who should have been contacted. I went on a mission trip to Cedar Rapid Iowa a few years ago when they had even worse flooding than Bloomington. My team worked on a house of an elderly couple who had already scooped all the mud out of their basement one bucket at a time. We helped clean what was left and worked on the first floor that also flooded as well as landscaping that washed away. It only took a few days to make their house livable again. Where are Bloomington’s volunteers? Where are the businesses (that weren’t forced to close during COVID and therefore made a fortune) donating materials? Has anyone asked?
Government’s job isn’t charity, as a minister Molly Ward should know that. Jesus never called on Rome to help the downtrodden. Open your Bible Molly instead of the taxpayers pockets.
Refer back to this story for more reasons why this is a bad idea: https://blnnews.com/2021/08/16/bloomington-on-dangerous-ground/
Maybe if scenes like below didn’t exist so much flooding could be avoided. It’s obviously been there a long time.
Douglas/Clinton area:
Just hit play to hear Molly Ward:
I have observed so many young men and women lining up at the convenient mart buying chips, cookies,ice cream, and soda and whipping out their link card to pay for their items observed last week a young man filling 3 grocery bags of junk $51.00 and yes out came the link card. God forbid that it be a requirement for these individuals to volunteer and work yes work to earn this free stuff. Just thinking
i have seen people buy tons of junk food with their link card only to pull out a wad of cash to buy cigarettes and lottery tickets. System is broken.
One way to look at it is that this isn’t charity so much as fixing a failure of past councils. This money to help should come out of the city’s budget. Sewers should have come before coliseums. Budgets should be adjusted with that in mind. Maybe that would be a wake up call?
Government can never be relied on to do the right thing. They love 10% voter turnout.
Agree and as long as the reporting that the majority of our community gets is from the pantagraph, voter turnout will not improve. Politically speaking the unstated purpose of the pantagraph is to keep progressives in power. Don’t ruffle any feathers and keep the citizens thinking everything is good.
Thanks to BLN NEWS and Cities there is another voice out there. You must be amplified somehow.
This initiative is a bad idea for many reasons…those who support it wanted to provide direct aid to their friends during COVID. They are also the ones who voted against funding the Locust/Colton project to separate the combined sewers. Now they want to provide direct aid to their friends whose basement flooded. It is the mind-set of the SJW that creates financial ruin for government.