My worst election nightmare has come true. The thing I dreaded most was a runoff with Gary Morris. Let me start by saying that I think he is a very good person and has been a tremendous benefit for our city the last twelve years. He handles himself with class, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him and his family. Now let the bashing begin. I am only kidding folks, but I am going to point out a few differences between him and myself.
I believe the key to making our city thrive again is continued improvements in quality and quantity of services and entertainment in our city. I believe we must have a proactive (I hate that word) approach toward business recruitment in our city, but at the same time we must be fiscally responsible. I believe your councilman must be open to your ideas and available to hear them. Last but not least, I believe we must be passionate about the job of being YOUR councilman.
We must be able to bring in new businesses to make up for the ones that have left and the lack of revenue we are currently bringing in. I stated six weeks ago that the key to this is hiring a city recruiter/planner that gets paid by the job he does. We currently have a part time person doing this and we have lost 13 % of our businesses in the last 18 months. Businesses are not going to knock our door down to come here. We have the reputation of not being a friendly city to work with. The Inspection department is considered to be the wicked witch of the south. These things cannot be fixed overnight, but at the same time we cant wait four years to fix them either
Fiscally responsible. Think about this for a moment. What would happen to Gardendale if Wal-mart left tomorrow? How would we survive? Would the stores that are now in that area survive without it? Could we find someone to replace it? I will not try to answer this for you, but this is the position we as a city are in right now. My worry is that we would have to use all of our reserves just to maintain current services with a growing population. We have not been successful in recent months in recruitment of businesses so there is no reason to think this will change. That would bring us to the dreaded tax that we all despise.
We have hampered ourselves by having a horrible attitude within the Inspections Department. The city is following trucks around to see where they are going, trying to stop teenagers from cutting grass, badgering builders with every kind of permit known to man to pick up $35.00. The question that I have is this: how many small businesses have we run off by doing this? How many companies turn a deaf ear to the city because of our reputation of being hard to work with? This began under our current councilman and it must stop. I will do everything in my power to help the inspection department start improving our reputation in the city and beyond.
In my opinion, the biggest weakness that Mr. Morris has is that he has made decisions without getting input from the people he represents. I saw him several times during the last election and not once since. I called him on the phone and told him about a situation with the sewage overflowing at the baseball field and was put off to the mayor. This will not be the case if I am elected. I will handle all I can, explain what I cannot and be available to you at all times.
I have repeatedly talked about passion in my blog posts and during campaigning. This is one of the reasons I believe term limits are good. A new candidate is going to hit the ground running and work hard to make things work, especially if he has a vested interest. I am a type-A personality and I cannot stand the thought of failure. I will give Gardendale my all for at most two terms and then step aside and let someone else carry the fire. Mr. Morris would be starting his fourth term as a councilman and in my opinion some of that fire has dwindled. That would be only natural after 12 years.
This race will decide if we are going to have a majority of new faces or if the old regime stays intact. I ask you, the residents of ward 2, to give me the opportunity to work with the new council to return our city to its past glory. Teamwork is going to be very important. New ideas and the fire to accomplish goals will be my priority. Thank you very much for your support in the election
Mike “Buckett” Burkett
No comments:
Post a Comment