A Few Minutes with the Mayor – June 2015

Well… it seems as if your Mayor has finally done it. I broke a rule every Boy Scout was taught since the first one earned that title in 1910. Even my grade school teachers did their best to make me understand… in any endeavor, in any undertaking, in any set of circumstances… “BE PREPARED.” It seems simple enough, but yours truly failed to do just that at the first City Council meeting in May.

So what could possibly have been brought before the City Council to create this problem? Why nothing less than the subject of the 2nd floor of the Courthouse! How could I have been unprepared you ask? I’ve been talking about it for years. I gave tours to hundreds of citizens this past December. The Mail Tribune ran a first page article on it. I’ve written columns about it in this very newspaper. The Council itself commissioned a public study on the subject. Unprepared… preposterous! But I was.

Understand, when dealing with any body of people, one should always remember that each member of that body is, first… different from all the other members, and second… in a mindset that may be different than surmised. Ignoring these fundamentals can lead to a condition where one’s face is red… with embarrassment.

My sin was simple enough. With all the dialogue these past two years, both public and private, I assumed (Oh! Oh! There’s that bad word) everyone was fully cognizant of where we were on this project and ready to move ahead. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

One council member questioned the whole project. This member had never seen any of the news print on the matter. Talk about a blow to my writer’s ego. Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Perhaps I didn’t bleed enough for this council member to remember anything I wrote. Whatever the cause for lack of familiarity, it did give me pause to wonder why write if no one reads what I write?

Many years ago there was a motion picture produced with the title Colonel Effingham’s Raid. No… it wasn’t about a military campaign. It was about a political campaign… one waged by a retired Colonel to save an historic Courthouse in his small town. In the plot, the Colonel had to fight the Mayor and the City Council and their cronies who planned on tearing down the Courthouse and building a new structure. Well, our Council has saved our Courthouse so we won’t have that problem. Our City offices will move into the ground floor thereby guaranteeing the Courthouse will be around for at least another generation or two. The Council was right in saving it. We do live in an incredibly historic town so what could be more appropriate?

Some have said to us… “In order to succeed, you need a plan.” Indeed! I have heard that often about this Courthouse project. I still remember someone yelling those very words at me when we had the audacity to accept the building from the County. Somehow it didn’t seem to be very important to the doubters that Jacksonville had been given an entire city block in the heart of the city… free and with no strings. Still, who can argue with the need for planning in this day of endless engineering, social as well as mechanical. But I would add one more very important ingredient, without which all the plans in the world will never succeed… and that ingredient is vision. The great Helen Keller once said, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.” What an incredible truth from one born blind.

Speaking of vision… In 1883, the citizens of Jacksonville were so proud of their newly-constructed Courthouse, they celebrated with a grand ball in the great room on the second floor. Imagine the horse-drawn carriages lined up to drop the guests in their formal attire at the main entrance. It must have been quite a sight! Wouldn’t it be wonderful to recreate that event when we finish the 2nd floor? True, we might have to use cars instead of carriages, but it could be The Event of the year, big enough even for a television network to cover.

I’ll close on that note. I still need to wash the egg off my face.