The Mayor is at it again

Another new feature has appeared on Mayor Purzner's website ( http://www.annpurzner.com/ ).

This time it is the Voting and Attendance "Record" for the Council Members of the City of Overland. This is good information, but it is far from complete. I doubt it will ever include all of the meetings prior to the swearing in of Mayor Purzner where She (then still a Councilperson for Ward 3), Councilman Knode and Councilman Owensby did not attend meetings in order to prevent the city from doing business (due to a lack of a Quorum). It will likely not include the meetings prior to the election where Councilman Knode did not attend (of which there were many).

If the Mayor wants to truly provide a service to the residents of Overland rather than just more spin, she would expand that Voting and Attendance "Record" out to cover the last 3 years. Of course if she did that we would all see that she and her Councilmen have a long history of failing to appear at meetings. This was a wonderful political tool for her under the previous Mayor, but now that she are Mayor it is wrong? For most people, Morals are a constant Mayor Purzner, not a matter of convenience.

Then there is the interesting way the Mayor presents the voting "record". Her website's presentation makes it appear as if those council persons who opposed her voted against every key issue of the Capital Improvements Budget, and the General Funds Budget individually. If fact, they were not given that option, the budget vote is an all or nothing proposition. Since there were items in each budget that those councilmen felt they could not, in good conscience, vote in favor of, they were forced to vote no on the entire budget.

Mayor Purzner, if you really do want to see the city move forward, why not take all those key issues shown on your site and allow the Overland City Council to vote on them individually? Then the city could move forward in many areas while the council works out the remaining few. Of course, you will not do that, because you to are willing to allow this to be an all or nothing proposition. You and your Councilman are willing to allow the city to be placed "on hold" rather then treat the few contested issues separately so we can move forward with the remaining 90% or better of the city budget.

Then there are the wonderful Graphs that show how much overpaid the Chief of Police and the City Clerk are. The problem with these graphs are the "comparable position" lines. Is it really a "comparable position" when the person holding that job was only recently appointed? When you consider the Overland Chief of Police and the Overland City Clerk have been there for years, how can you directly compare them to people who just took those jobs? Consider the City Clerk. Does 19 years of experience mean nothing to the Mayor? What about 37 years of experience for the Chief of police?

The Mayor and her Councilmen have a long history of only telling part of the story and spinning the heck out of it to try to convince us that fact is fiction and fiction is fact. Mayor Purzner, if you want reasonable people to take the information you present seriously, then please provide the information on where these "comparable positions" are and what responsibilities they hold in comparison to our Chief and Clerk, on the same page on your website. This is Missouri Mayor, if you want us to take your presentation seriously you're going to have to "show us" the facts behind your presentation. Facts that we can verify.

Ever since the Boy Scout Letter fiasco a few years ago I have a hard time trusting what Mayor Purzner tells us when the presentation does not include any verifiable facts or sources.