It was like an intervention.
For Monday night’s Pine Bluff City Council meeting, Alderman Steven Mays had included in the council packet a resolution of no confidence in the city’s Street Department and for the firing of that department’s director, Rick Rhoden.
Mayor Shirley Washington and perhaps others had tried to get him to pull the measure, but Mays being Mays, he wanted it left in. His fellow council members did not just chastise him over the content of the resolution, they pummeled him over the way he handled it. In the end, his was the lone vote for his proposal.
Let’s start with the problem that Mays sees as the issue: street maintenance. Had he just stopped there, he might have put together a pretty large parade of backers. A photo that ran with a story The Commercial did last week on the subject showed a pothole, perhaps it should be POTHOLE, considering that spelunkers were seen rappelling down its sides to investigate its furthest reaches. OK, we jest. Maybe it was just little children running around down there.
The point is that he’s not wrong about the streets needing work. There are problems all over, for sure. Where he erred, however, was in failing to do any due diligence as to why the problems were happening and instead, lunging, ham handed-like, for someone’s job — all without the benefit of bringing his proposed resolution to a committee for consideration and then approval to be sent to the full council.
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And a good number of fellow council members let him have it over his missteps.
“There’s one thing to say that we need to address some issues,” said Alderman Glen Brown Jr. “There’s another thing to say that we want a man to lose his job because of it. There’s a way to handle issues that you have with the Street Department without asking for someone’s job.”
Brown and others went on to say that one of the problems Rhoden is having is lack of staffing.
The department, Brown said, is responsible for all manner of street work: repairing and patching potholes, cleaning out ditches, doing cleanup jobs, to name a few.
“They have a lot on their plates and sometimes you don’t have enough manpower to stretch across all those different tasks,” Brown said. “I really don’t like seeing things like this in my packet. I feel like there’s a better way to resolve issues than this.”
Said Alderman Bruce Lockett, “No way we would do this to any city employee, not a department head or other would we do such a thing as this.”
And this from Alderman Win Trafford: “I just want to say that I think it’s completely inappropriate for this resolution to have hit our packet. This is not the place for this discussion and any additional conversations we have on issues such as this certainly should be done in committee meetings and maybe one-on-one with the department head. I’m completely opposed to this. I’m actually embarrassed for our city that it came before us tonight.”
Ouch!
This may have been the most vociferous the other council members have been with Mays, who has a habit of showing up with something from his ala carte list of gripes, but considering that he’s been chastised before, we doubt that he will change his ways.
And it is embarrassing. Not so much for the city, which is bigger than one wayward council member, but really just embarrassing for Mays.
That’s unfortunate because he does hit on substantive issues from time to time that need to be looked at. But he diminishes his message with his delivery. In short, on too many occasions, there’s a right way and a Mays way.
Imagine had he asked Rhoden to attend a committee meeting and the three council members and the department head talked about the problems and looked for solutions both for the short term and for the next year or two. But that would take some effort and diligence and tact — things that seem always to be in short supply when Mays brings legislation to the fore.