local news

Childers is gone; let’s get busy finding permanent manager

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Terry Childers’ sudden departure this week as Amarillo’s interim city manager brings to mind the question that has been nagging at a lot of us around the city.

What’s taking the City Council so long to find a permanent manager?

Childers came on board exactly one year ago after Jarrett Atkinson — Lubbock’s brand new city manager — quit as Amarillo city manager. Childers was seen as a fixer, someone who could repair what supposedly was broken at City Hall.

The council started looking for a permanent manager. Then it stopped looking. Childers would stay on until after next spring’s municipal election, or so it was supposed to go.

Then he popped off one time too many. He called a constituent a “stupid son of a b****.” No can say such a thing, Mr. Manager. You may go now.

So, he did. Childers tendered his resignation and then skedaddled back to Oklahoma City. This brings up a side issue. Childers’ resignation letter mentioned his final day being Dec. 16, but he cleared out his office and left. My understanding is that he’s done … but do we pay him for his final month anyway?

Amarillo ought to be able to attract top-drawer administrative talent. We’re a city on the move. We’ve been in constant growth mode for several decades. We’re in the midst of an extreme makeover downtown. The position pays well, about a quarter-million bucks a year, give or take a few thousand.

Is it the “dysfunction” on the City Council, which Childers himself described some months ago, that keeps quality applicants from seeking this job? It’s reasonable to wonder such a thing, given that the council majority changed dramatically after the May 2015 election.

Amarillo has to get its municipal government structure straightened out. I’ve long believed we’re better than to wallow in the kind of back-biting, sniping, griping and petulance we’ve heard coming from City Hall over the past year or so.

This might be a good time for Mayor Paul Harpole to conduct one of those “rolling quorums” designed to get everyone aboard the same ship. The council cannot meet as a group and talk privately about public issues without violating state open meetings laws.

So, it might be wise for the mayor — who fancies himself as a take-charge guy — to talk to each council member one at a time and persuade each of them that the time has arrived for the five-member choir to start singing from the same hymnal.

A city of 200,000 residents doesn’t run itself. Especially now, with so much work to be finished … and so much more to do.

national news

VP-elect gets booed at ‘Hamilton’ … and Trump wants an apology?

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Mike Pence went to a show last night and got greeted with a mixture of boos and cheers.

So what? The vice president-elect is about to assume a new post in the Trump administration in the wake of a hotly contested election. His side got fewer popular votes than the other side. The nation is deeply divided.

Does he expect to be greeted now with universal good cheer? Of course not!

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-demands-apology-from-hamilton-cast-after-mike-pence-booed/ar-AAku2i4?li=BBnb7Kz

What is even weirder, though, is that the president-elect has demanded an apology. From whom? The audience members who jeered Pence? Who, precisely, is supposed to issue such an apology?

This kind of thing goes with the territory. I am betting that Pence — who’s actually held public office for quite some time — gets it. He understands the give-and-take often leads to the rough-and-tumble and that feelings do get strained and hurt in the course of a difficult political battle.

So it is as the dust starts to settle on this highly improbable presidential election — and its stunning conclusion.

national news, political news

Surely, Mitt doesn’t need a paycheck

Mitt Romney once called it exactly right about Donald Trump.

He called the next president of the United States a “phony,” a “fraud.” Romney questioned whether Trump was hiding some potentially criminal activity by refusing to release his tax returns.

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee said some amazingly harsh things about the 45th president. Romney endeared himself so much to many Americans — me included — that we actually begin thinking kindly of him, wishing he were the GOP candidate instead of Trump.

Why, I even began referring to him by his first name, which actually is his middle name. Mitt this, Mitt that.

So, what in the world is Mitt doing by making himself available to be considered for secretary of state in the Trump administration?

Hey, Mitt’s a rich guy, too. He doesn’t need the money. Nor does he need to the embarrassment of representing Donald Trump’s world view to a world still reeling by the very thought of Trump becoming president of the greatest nation on Earth.

Doesn’t the next president recall what Mitt said in 2012 about Russia? I’ll remind him here. Mitt declared that Russia presented the “greatest global geopolitical threat” to the United States. Trump, meanwhile, is accepting high praise from Russian strongman/dictator/former spook Vladimir Putin. Which is it? Greatest threat or potential ally?

Frankly, Mitt’s assessment looks more accurate and prescient than anything Trump has said about Russia.

Then we have the nature of the criticism. The video I’ve attached to this blog post is quite revealing. It’s only 17 minutes long. But it’s a doozy.

Oh, and Trump’s response to it? He called Mitt a “loser” who “begged” Trump for his endorsement four years ago.

Say it won’t happen, Mitt. Tell us that you’re just stringing Trump along. While you’re at it, when you get him in that room in private at Trump Tower, please reiterate what you said about him on the campaign trail. It was all true then … and it’s true to this very day.

You’re better than this, Mitt.

national news, political news

Trump picks demonstrate anti-unity theme

sessions

Donald Trump has vowed to “unify” the nation after a bitter campaign that elected him the next president of the United States.

Who, then, does he pick for his national security team?

Let’s see: retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who will lead the National Security Agency, says that fear of Muslims is “rational”; Kansas U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo, who will lead the CIA, believes Muslims contribute to the terror threat by refusing to repudiate terrorism; U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, whom Trump has nominated to be attorney general, was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s because of allegedly racist comments he made as a U.S. attorney in Alabama.

Trump is making no apologies for targeting people of certain faiths and he is making no amends toward the African-American community by nominating someone with, um, a checkered civil-rights past to lead the Justice Department.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump%e2%80%99s-national-security-choices-reinforce-his-unapologetic-views-on-terrorism/ar-AAktCJm?li=BBnb7Kz

None of this should surprise anyone, I suppose. The president-elect is precisely who he says he is: a tough guy who vows to roll back many of the policies of the administration he will succeed.

According to the New York Times: “The reaction from Democrats was immediate and angry. ‘The president-elect has created a White House leadership that embodies the most divisive rhetoric of his campaign,’ Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said on Friday. ‘To the extent that these become policies or legislative proposals, I commit to stopping them.’”

Perhaps the most amazing view from this national security team came from Gen. Flynn, who supports a national registry of Muslims and compares such registration to the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. President Roosevelt overreacted grossly to a perceived threat from loyal Americans as the nation entered World War II and that overreaction has been universally condemned in the years since as a tragic mistake.

Oh yes. A new day is about to dawn in Washington, D.C. Let’s all get ready for some storm clouds that are beginning to boil up on the political horizon.

local news, Uncategorized

Childers needed to go; here’s why

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If I had been given the opportunity to write an editorial explaining why Amarillo’s former interim city manager needed a boot in the backside, I might have written something like this:

Terry Childers overstayed his welcome in Amarillo and it was time for him to hit the road.

It wasn’t that he was doing a bad job administratively. By many lights, he had infused City Hall with a renewed can-do attitude and had made some key decisions involving key personnel. He hired a police chief, Ed Drain, who has committed his department to community policing. Good call … and Childers deserves credit for recognizing that initiative in the new police chief.

But, oh man, the city manager revealed a mouth that he at times couldn’t control.

His resignation this week came after only the latest example of Childers engaging his pie hole without thinking first. He muttered “stupid son of a b****” into an open mic in the direction of a constituent. That was the last straw.

He had earlier scolded the City Council — the very people who hired him — for creating a “dysfunctional” atmosphere at City Hall. And before that — not long after he got hired — Childers berated an emergency services dispatcher after he misplaced his briefcase at a local hotel and all but called out the National Guard to find it.

The city manager is something of an ambassador for the city he serves, for the people to whom he answers. Whether it’s the elected body that hired him or taxpayers who foot the bill with their own money, the city manager is a hired hand. He works for us, not the other way around.

In that regard, the interim manager fell short of the mark.

***

I didn’t get to write that editorial, quite obviously. So I have decided to state my piece here.

The Amarillo Globe-News didn’t say it, either. Instead of offering a high-minded editorial that took Childers to the woodshed and delivered a whuppin’ he deserved, the newspaper cleared out the Opinion page and blasted a sophomoric “Goodbye Terry” farewell message that accomplished nothing except perhaps make Childers a sympathetic character in an ongoing feud in which has been engaged with the publisher of the newspaper, Lester Simpson.

Maybe the G-N will get around — eventually — to offering some words of wisdom about what we have all just witnessed.

Childers was right about a few things during his time in Amarillo. One of them related to the “caustic” political atmosphere at City Hall, which Councilman Elisha Demerson suggested might be at the heart of the “stupid SOB” comment the other evening. The environment frustrated Childers, according to Demerson, who suggested that the manager was venting.

The events of the past few days — with all the characters involved in this soap opera — have made the city’s task of finding  a new permanent city manager even more difficult.

Amarillo is undergoing some pretty radical changes at this very moment, starting with the effort to reshape, revive and remake its downtown district. The city needs a strong, steady hand to guide the municipal ship. It also needs a City Council that acts as a team, rather than a collection of individuals each with his own agenda.

I am going to say a prayer or two that the city will find that individual — whether he or she lives elsewhere or perhaps already is on board within the current administrative staff.

I believe most of us who have been watching City Hall over the years would agree on at least one critical point: The city has a serious mess on its hands.

local news

Atkinson lands on his feet; Amarillo still on the deck

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It’s official.

Lubbock’s municipal management leadership team is whole again, while Amarillo’s team has taken a header into the crapper.

Jarrett Atkinson — the former Amarillo city manager — is taking the helm as Lubbock city manager. The Lubbock City Council voted unanimously Thursday night to offer Atkinson the job. He’ll take it and he’ll then bring his substantial expertise on city issues — notably water management and development — to his new job.

Amarillo’s municipal future is decidedly less rosy at the moment.

Its interim city manager, Terry Childers, has quit after mouthing off into a “hot mic” about a constituent, calling him a “stupid son of a b****.” It’s only the latest intemperate remark that Childers has delivered during the year he served as interim manager, a post he took after Atkinson was forced to quit the top job at Amarillo City Hall.

To worsen matters, the Amarillo Globe-News took a decidedly unprofessional approach to chastising Childers by publishing a two-word “editorial” on its Opinion page. “Goodbye Terry” the paper blared on the page in gigantic type. That’s it. Nothing else.

Childers clearly needed to be taken to the woodshed, but it should have occurred in the form of a studied, well-researched and stern editorial commentary.

I would laugh out loud at the paper’s ridiculously chickens*** approach, except that it saddens and disgusts me that the paper’s publisher has taken his personal feud with Childers onto the page in such a manner.

What cannot yet be determined is whether such stupidity has inflicted a mortal wound on the city’s effort to lure a top-tier administrator to become its next city manager.

Childers’ exit in this manner all by itself quite likely could be enough to dissuade such applicants from wanting anything to do with Amarillo’s dysfunctional governance. I’m still shaking my head over what the newspaper has done to potentially worsen matters.

Congratulations belong to Jarrett Atkinson and his new employers in Lubbock. Amarillo, meanwhile, deserves wishes of good luck as it staggers back to its feet in the wake of its latest embarrassment.

local news, political news

Early vote record produces a mixed result

voting

Let’s crunch some numbers from the presidential election.

I want to examine briefly the record-setting early-vote totals in one Texas county — the one where I live — and try to determine if it meant a greater overall turnout.

Randall County voted 80 percent in favor of the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump. That’s the least surprising result, given the county’s strong GOP tradition. You can’t find a Democratic candidate running for anything in this county. Indeed, the loneliest job in America — next, perhaps, to the Maytag repairman — might be Randall County’s Democratic chair.

The county registered more than 43,000 early votes prior to the Nov. 8 election. In 2012, a total of about 49,600 voters cast ballots in the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney; captured the Randall County vote by an even greater percentage than Trump did.

This year, the unofficial vote total for Randall County sits at 54,185. That’s an increase of about 5,000 votes from four years ago.

The county had about 85,000 registered voters this year, which puts the percentage turnout at about 63 percent.

To that I would say, “Not bad at all.” Of course, the number goes down when you factor in the total number of eligible voters, which includes those who aren’t registered to vote.

What does all this mean?

http://uselectionatlas.org/2016.php

I guess it means that the record number of early voters did translate into a ginned-up interest in this election — much to my own surprise. I had thought the election would produce a dismally low turnout, even in this GOP-friendly region.

Still, the percentage of turnout across the state remains far short of anything to boast about. The national turnout appears headed for a 20-year low.

I am delighted that Texas makes it so easy for residents to vote early. I remain dedicated, though, to the idea of waiting until Election Day to cast my ballot.

For those who did vote early — and to those who perhaps voted for the first time — congratulations and well done.

 

media news

You have unprofessional, petulant, petty … and then you have this

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Take a look at this page. It’s today’s Opinion page from the Amarillo Globe-News, the newspaper where I worked for nearly 18 years.

What you see here is the product of a personal feud between the newspaper’s publisher, Lester Simpson and Amarillo’s now-former interim city manager, Terry Childers.

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Words damn near fail me as I ponder what the publisher has done under the name of the organization he has overseen since the summer of 2002.

Childers quit his municipal post this week after muttering a profane epithet at a constituent during an Amarillo City Council meeting.

This is the response today from the newspaper of record. Did the city manager deserve criticism for his own brand of  unprofessional behavior? Of course he did. The newspaper should have delivered it in the form of an editorial explaining why the manager was out of line. But no-o-o-o. The paper delivered this instead.

A few words come to mind: petulant, unprofessional, bullying, petty, shameful, reprehensible, disgusting. Pick one. Pick more if you like. Pick ’em all. Add some more if you choose.

Rarely during the nearly four decades I worked in daily print journalism have I seen such a display from an organization that is charged with being the voice of reason in a community.

Some longtime Amarillo and Texas Panhandle residents will have looked at this page this morning and have been reminded of another such display.

It occurred in the late 1980s when the former Amarillo resident and oil/natural gas tycoon T. Boone Pickens got into a beef with the newspaper over its coverage of local issues and — namely — Pickens himself. Pickens launched a boycott against the Globe-News. He then persuaded the paper’s corporate ownership, Morris Communications, to “reassign” the then-publisher, Jerry Huff.

On Huff’s last day as publisher, one could see a banner hanging from the side of what was known as the Mesa Building. It read: “Goodbye Jerry.”

That, ladies and gents, is the model of decorum that the current publisher of the newspaper demonstrated today with that ridiculous and childish message.

Simpson and Childers have been feuding for nearly the entire time that Childers took over as interim manager. I am not privy to the root of their mutual displeasure. Simpson reportedly disliked the way Childers handled downtown redevelopment. The disagreement likely turned into something much more heated with the forced resignation of Melissa Dailey, former head of Downtown Amarillo Inc., with whom Simpson had worked on downtown issues.

Suffice to say, though, that this example demonstrates how low one can go when disputing matters of public policy.

There’s intelligent, reasoned disagreement. Then there is this.

Good grief!

This thought comes to mind. Given that the Globe-News endorsed Donald J. Trump for president, perhaps the publisher of the paper can seek a job in the Trump administration.

He’d fit right in with the bully in chief.

local news

Karma reveals changing municipal fortunes

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You’ve no doubt heard the saying: Karma’s a bitch.

As such, it works in the strangest ways one can imagine. Consider the fortunes of two leading West Texas municipal government operations.

Amarillo is now looking once again for a city manager to replace the interim manager the City Council appointed to navigate the city through some rough water. Interim manager Terry Childers is out after he muttered a profane epithet into an open mic at a constituent. Childers resigned his temporary job and is slated to depart no later than Dec. 16.

City Hall is roiling yet again in controversy at the highest levels of its municipal administration. Sheesh. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

B’bye, Mr. Manager.

Meanwhile, down the road about 120 miles in Lubbock, the man Childers succeeded as city manager, Jarret Atkinson, reportedly is about to be named that city’s new city manager. The announcement is likely to be made public on Thursday.

Atkinson was drummed out of office in Amarillo because — it has been reported — he couldn’t work with the new majority elected in May 2015.

Atkinson has become a superior water development expert, and he brought his valuable expertise to bear during his years as Amarillo city manager. Now he gets to deploy his vast knowledge of water management and development in Lubbock.

The former Amarillo city manager has done well for himself and Lubbock has likely done well for itself if it selects Atkinson as its next chief administrator.

Amarillo’s municipal future? It has been thrown into doubt once again. Karma does have this way of biting back … hard!

legal news, national news

Ted Cruz for Supreme Court?

UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 20: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., participate in the press conference on military aid to Israel with on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham has posited an interesting notion about who should be nominated to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

He says his Republican Senate colleague, Ted Cruz of Texas, should get the call.

Cruz would be hailed by everyone in the Senate as the perfect choice by the new president, according to Graham — but not for reasons that have anything to do with Cruz’s credentials.

Most of Cruz’s Senate colleagues detest him. They would vote virtually unanimously to send him to the Supreme Court, said Graham, who once joked that “if you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

Graham and Cruz, you must recall, once were GOP rivals for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016. Donald J. Trump ended up winning the presidency and now can nominate someone to fill the court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Do I think Cruz would be a good choice? No. I don’t want the court to mess with a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy or to undo its ruling that legalized gay marriage.

Still, Sen. Cruz — or “Lyin’ Ted,” as Trump once labeled him — would be a most provocative selection for the court. He is a sharp lawyer, a former Texas solicitor general who has argued before the Supreme Court.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lindsey-graham-ted-cruz-supreme-court_us_582ba677e4b01d8a014b4490

The new president might want to look to make a key appointment that would steer him away from difficult a Senate confirmation fight. In that context, Ted Cruz for the U.S. Supreme Court sounds like the right choice.

 

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