By: Diane Benjamin
A reader FOIA’d the Town of Normal over their “sympathy flowers” policy. The Normal taxpayers are paying for arrangements to be sent in sympathy to people Normal chooses to send them to. Picking Winners and Losers Normal? Are the people paying the bills ever told who flowers or plants are sent to?
That would be NO. It isn’t compassion to use other people’s money to express sympathy. It’s theft. From Bloomington’s meeting last Monday where the Council was told the City couldn’t legally write checks to people who had substantial damage from the flooding:
What Public Purpose justifies this:
There is no Public Purpose when the public doesn’t even know they sent anything!
The dollar amount is immaterial. The law doesn’t say it’s okay to use Public Funds if the amount is less than $xxx.
Change the policy to the last paragraph Normal, the rest is illegal.
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Who were the flowers for?
Lots of them over the years, people you have mostly never heard off
Pam is using Peterson as the scapegoat for her decision to be loose with our tax dollars. Someone should explain to her she is the Town Manager now and is responsible for how money is spent not someone who retired years ago. How does she not understand this? Wait, she is a hardcore Democrat and just like Biden, Obama, and Hillary they blame all of their bad decisions on someone else.
I respectfully disagree. City Manager and Staff make recommendation but it is the Council who is to set policy and they hold the purse strings. Like it has been said many times, elections have consequences.
6 out of 7 don’t care about silly things like laws