So the Gazette has an editorial today in response to my letter. My letter isn’t printed, but the response, of course, is. It accuses Worth A Dam of being “Conspiracy Theorists” and then proceeds to describe the conspiratorial means by which we ply our conspiring trade. Apparently she got three letters in response to sundays column on the same day. It is of course impossible that any of our 500+ regular readers of this blog would have had their own reaction to the paper running the story after the election. Its not like people stopped me at the dam when I wrote about the historic photo or when they heard about it on the news and asked, “have you sent this to the Gazette? They should run something”.
Obviously, no one other than conspiracy theorists would think that the fact that it appeared on the blog on the 29th, and in the paper on the 9th, is confusing. Surely only JFK whackos could be dismayed by the final “Seeking Council” column on affordable housing appearing on election Tuesday, when it was slated for the Thursday before.
Still, I’m not sure how one person making a bad decision constitutes a conspiracy.
I don’t know why the story wasn’t run before the election. I know for a fact it was received, but it may have been mislaid, forgotten, or shuffled out of site. I know that I can do more to followup when I’m not siting 8 hours a day on bridge watch before going to work. Maybe it will never happen again, and its a complete accident that it happened now. I’d feel more reassured if my letter, (unfounded accusation that it was), or any of the mysterious trio, was printed along with the rebuttal.
In the meantime, we are told to expect a column Thursday on the bank stabilization project. Since the Gazette is reading this blog at the moment, (to find what offensive material they might need to react to next), allow me to suggest what will happen when you contact councilman Ross and the city manager. Ross’ response will likely be the same as for Bay City Media, in which he says the bank of Bertola’s was never the concern. You may want to review the engineering reports to check if that’s true. I have highlighted the relevant passages here. If confronted that this is not what was said in court, the next excuse will be that this job was planned all along for that wall but the city ran out of money in 2000. To verify that you would have to get the city plans from the engineer, because to my knowledge no one’s ever seen them. Actually, I wouldn’t bother because the argument was never over whether this was planned for the wall, but whether it was an EMERGENCY that could affect downtown businesses if delayed. Finally, it would be useful to go back through the special assessment tax records and find out what the property owner paid in 1999 towards the flood project. I’m sure readers would like to know the Return On Investment he received.
Here’s some nice beaver followup in the meantime.
