The Fort Smith Board of Directors will meet on February 20 at......blah, blah, blah......
I won't bore you with the details. If you want to know about the $1.8 million-plus they are going to spend on a skatepark, sanitary sewer assessment, and water treatment plant improvements, you can read about it right HERE.
That will take you to the city of Fort Smith website. Normally I would download it and make it a linked document off this Facebook page, but I don't even have the heart to do that since clearly the city administrator and board of directors are an unstoppable force that apparently has the citizens permission to lie, cheat and steal their way to whatever their latest scheme is to spend as much of the taxpayers money as they can in the least amount of time.
This group of duly-elected (and unfortunately hired) "leaders" have lost all touch with reality. They are serious about pursuing their appeal of what should have been misdemeanor criminal convictions for violating the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, all the way to the state supreme court if necessary. Not serious enough to play their own legal fees, but serious enough to allow you and I to pay the freight all the way to their next "lost on appeal" rendering.
The bottom line? They just don't get it.
You can't violate the law because you don't like the law and appeal being told you violated the law because you still don't like the same law. The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act was formulated and passed by the Arkansas legislature. The courts have upheld the FOIA time an time again. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber(s) have been told by experts that the way to change the law they don't like is to approach the legislature and enact legislation to invalidate the parts you don't like.
Actually, I don't even know why I'm going over this again. The tax and spend performers in this three-ring-circus -- and at this point, I include the mayor and six of the seven city directors -- are either inept, clueless, or totally corrupt. Faced with zero-accountability and even less credibility, they have fallen into a "go along to get along" mentality as they are guided down a primrose path towards disaster by an outsider whose only skin in the game is cashing his overly generous paycheck...and his liberal agenda.
The efforts at recall have fallen by the wayside. The pieces put into place (at whatever cost) are doing the job they were hired to do, which is to deconstruct our city's history, heritage and integrity and rebuild it in the graven image of the left-wing program.
It's not even a hidden agenda. They are simply doing what they want in plain sight with no shame or without a second thought.
When the Great Geffken announced his plan to start a "data export page" -- seemingly to post all of the emails to and from the city directors --it was announced with great fanfare as their solution to the "transparency problem", which they created in the first place.
They threw out a handful (about four months worth) of seemingly sanitized emails. That was on January 16. I was told on January 18 that this was going to be a weekly "data export". Here we are a month later and nothing has been added to the "dump".
So much for transparency
And it's not even that. If they were going to be truly transparent you would think the city administrator would include his emails in the "dump".
Of course, the party-line is that all of his emails having to do with city business will be available in the director's emails. Except those that aren't. And those between him and the mayor, where they have been known to talk a little smack about Fort Smith citizens.
Plus, if the "dump" were even really a thing they would just avoid it by communicating through "personal mail accounts". Or text messages. Or cell phone calls. Or gathering in a back-room someplace to make their plans.
So Tuesday night, they will have a dog and pony show for the public, do what they have already decided to do and then conduct the real business at the next "study session" held in the middle of the day when people who have to work for a living have to work for a living.
Welcome to your city government.
Blah, blah, blah......