Amarillo City Council members cannot seem to get past the divisions with their ranks.
Three new guys got elected a year ago promising “change” in the way the city does business. They want more “transparency,” more “openness,” more “accountability.”
Good deal. We’re all for it.
The schism seem to narrow a bit when the council agreed unanimously on some steps to move the downtown revival strategy forward.
Then a vacancy developed at Place 2. Brian Eades wants to move to Colorado to set up a medical practice. He intends to resign his council seat effective later this summer.
Now comes yet another controversy to sweep in over the rest of the council.
One of the applicants for Eades’ seat, Sandra McCartt, has posted some rather blunt and unflattering commentary on Facebook.
The divide between the three new guys and the two “old-timers” has widened once again.
The three newbies — Randy Burkett, Elisha Demerson and Mark Nair — believe McCartt’s comments do not disqualify her. The other two, Eades and Mayor Paul Harpole, believe they do.
Harpole walked out of a closed council meeting Tuesday, saying he didn’t “trust the process.”
Suppose the council had instituted a vetting protocol that would have discovered these social media posts earlier in the process. Would they have been able to make a determination on the five finalists? Perhaps. Then again, they might have argued vehemently among themselves as they began culling the list of applicants from 14 to the five finalists.
It’s a new day at Amarillo City Hall, all right.
The “change” that city voters sought is looking once again to be something quite different from the “change” they got.
Pass the peanuts and the popcorn.