The Mayor's New Task Force: Where's My Name?

You may recall that a few weeks ago our silly Mayor announced that he was creating yet another task force to develop a plan for a new event center. Reacting to the complaints that the last group was a hand-picked collection of yes men, Munson opened the application process to anybody willing to answer five fifth-grade level questions. He claimed that he wanted this new committee to be “independent” and “broad-based”.
Well, I do think I’m smarter than a fifth-grader (see what I did there?), so I spent ninety seconds filling out the form, and mailed it to City Hall. Every day, I sat by the telephone with my computer on my lap and an eye on my mailbox to see if I received the Golden Ticket.
Obviously (and not surprisingly), I didn’t make the cut. This past weekend, the Mayor announced the eighteen-member committee and my name was nowhere to be found on the list.
Neither were too many other of what I would call the “normals”. Sure, there is a token “regular Joe” or two on the member list, and I’m sure they’ll be trotted out to say what they’ve been told to say. That’s too bad, too, as I’ve been told that out of the 100 people that applied, a good percentage of them were the blue-collar types that would have brought a lot of insight into the thought process of the average city resident.
Instead, we get the usual suspects. Almost a third of the committee placements are city employees supposedly representing their departments. I’d say they are over-represented. Should there be two members of both the City Council and School District? Plus a member of the Chamber of Commerce? Oh, I’m sure he’ll be open-minded.
The rest of the group involves mainly people who one would expect the Mayor would appoint anyway. People involved in construction, advertising, banking, and a lawyer or two. The co-chair is from the Argus, which has been begging for a new facility for years. Yep, almost everybody has a vested interest in this building being built.
Yet they are missing one crucial voice in this discussion. There’s nobody on that panel that has any knowledge of the music industry. I hear so many myths about the concert business, and they need at least one person who can give honest answers. Just yesterday I heard some confused, middle-aged cretin complain that Omaha was getting Neil Diamond, and that if we had an 18,000 seat building not only would he be here but tickets would cost less. Um, no and no.
So maybe the Mayor had reasons for not giving me that place on the panel. I can understand that. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that we’re once again getting nothing more than “yes men” that will tell the Mayor exactly what he wants to hear. When we’re talking about a hundred million bucks, we desperately need people that will ask the tough questions. Clearly, we’re not getting them here.