All right, Democrat Monroe City Councilor Rodney McFarland, we’ll take your word that you’re “far from being a fool.” But so are others in government, the citizenry, and the general public who are on to your game that puts a political agenda and its associated theater ahead of responsible consideration of the people’s needs.
At the last Council meeting, the independent Mayor Friday Ellis Administration brought back a proposal to improve the Jackson Street corridor from DeSiard St. north of St. Francis Medical Center south past Interstate 20, a bit more than one and a quarter miles. Originally approved in 2012 by the state with a local match of just under 20 percent, the Democrat former Mayor Jamie Mayo Administration did nothing with it. Ellis resurrected the project as part of his Downtown Strategic Plan, but after Council approval in 2021 when it went out to bid the city ended up rejecting those it received as these came in substantially higher than the allocated funding.
Since then, the state came up with more dollars that broadened its scope to include accessible sidewalks, traffic control devices, and lighting. After the city reworked the plan, the state authorized it again to move forward but with an increased local match from $479,000 to $777,000, so this increased price tag required additional Council approval.
Which it didn’t provide, with McFarland leading the opposition. In a rambling exchange, where at multiple junctures he repeated what he was far from being, he advocated to postpone the issue because he didn’t have enough information, even though all councilors had received by e-mail far in advance of the meeting an outline of the project and had been solicited by the administration to forward any questions that had brought no response from McFarland. He elaborated that the delay would allow time to make sure his constituents weren’t “hoodwinked” over something he declared, as a result of his quest to “connect the dots” as to the timing of moving forward, was being fast-tracked for some unspoken but apparently sinister reason.
It’s not so objectionable that McFarland, as he and other Democrats on the Council Verbon Muhammad and Juanita Woods have triggered several times over the first year of the Council’s term, induced needless delay over a matter using the same tired excuse that the Ellis Administration has kept them in the dark when in reality it typically makes the effort to inform councilors about important matters at hand. It’s that the three Democrats appear simply as wanting to be obstructionist as a means to propagate indirectly rather than openly a narrative that everything the Ellis Administration does is by definition suspicious concerning their constituents, as a means of undermining Ellis.
This project has little in the way of controversy. The previous Council, without McFarland and Muhammad, approved its earlier incarnation unanimously – including Woods who joined with the other two to delay this iteration. In fact, the project occurs entirely in McFarland’s district, meaning his constituents will be the primary beneficiaries of it, yet he wants to delay it?
McFarland says the Council won’t act as a “rubber stamp.” But there’s a great deal of difference between vetting administration requests through an informed line of salient questioning and with proffering vague, unsubstantiated innuendo apparently uninterested in knowing the facts, all designed to pursue an agenda interested not in policy outputs but in pursuing a power struggle to enhance personal political agendas.
Grandstanding is not governing, and the sooner Democrat councilors get away from the former to move to the latter, the better off Monroe’s quality of governance will become. Anybody far from being a fool should know that by now.
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