THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (IN FLORENCE CITY HALL)

 

The special called meeting to discuss the plans for a new city hall building, 01/14, started a little differently. The seating arrangement did anyway. The chairs were not centered in the room in a circle. They were arranged around 3 tables pushed together in a square.  Well, sort of. The bottom line is: circle or square, this meeting ended in almost the same way it started. There were no firm plans for either the old parking deck or city hall building.  Maybe next time Kaytrina Simmons can have the group meet and sit in a triangle shape. 

They all did agree to stay under the $50 million dollars that had been borrowed to build a new city hall building. 

There was a new element in the mix: an annex building. On this, yours truly is truly confused. It was never fully explained, at least to me, whether they were talking about buying a lot and building a new annex building on it or they had a constructed building in mind. I think they were talking about buying a lot. It would cost anywhere from $2 million to $6 million.

With this, the discussion between Bill Griffin and Jimmy Oliver got a little heated. For Griffin, the $6 million figure was a proposal killer. Oliver acted like this upset  him. This exchange was enlightening and put Bill Griffin way up the register on my respect meter. 

Jackie Hendrix had done his due diligence regarding the city hall building and had an engineer inspect the building and assess that it would cost more to remodel than to demolish and build a new structure. He had gotten this done for free according to him. I give him props for that, but somehow though, he is tied up with the “annex” proposal. Another thread to unravel.  

The other point that is really unclear is what they plan to do with the property after they demolish the original parking deck. It seems nobody got an independent engineer to inspect it and the wrecking ball is in its future for sure it appears. But the other new point is now they are planning on tearing down one parking deck and building another? 

And even more confusing than this was the different figures that were being discussed. I did not receive a high enough grade in accounting to keep up with that and something tells me all but maybe one on the council didn’t either.

I truly do not know how to describe this meeting. Whether he gets kudos or not, the one who should be wearing the cape in this whole affair is David Carson. He hits every meeting, be it city council or one of the different committee meetings, and records every one of them for the citizens to see. He does not receive a dime for his work, does this on his spare time, and has stated he started doing it and continues to do it because he wants the citizens of  Florence to have transparency in their government. Just watching this meeting was enough for me. Sitting through it, he should have received some kind of reward. I am adding it to this blog posting below. If your eyes glaze over during the meeting, make sure to skip to the last 10 minutes or so. You will get a good look at the shape the City of Florence government is in.

Editor's Note: To us, the words between Mr. Oliver and Mr. Griffin couldn't compare in drama to Jivin' Jackie Hendrix being an arrogant ass to Council President Simmons. He needs to realize he's not speaking to the Big Dombrowski, but to his superior.