At last night's Town Hall meeting, it was the Public Works Director and the engineering firm who educated, persuaded, and advised us citizens, not the reverse. Curent hostile city council and city staff legitimized the manipulative agenda by emphasizing the terms "information-gathering," public relations," "Citizens Input and "support" as the explicit function of last night's Town Hall Meeting.
So If I had attended last night's meeting, I would have said....
The citizens of Corinth are gathered tonight, called to this public meeting by the city, to share our thoughts on the plans to reconstruct South Corinth Street, but let me preface my comments about the plans to reconstruct South Corinth Street by telling you what I know about citizen participation in public meetings.
At meetings such as this we can be certain of one thing: The city planners, the mayor, city council, city manager, and our public works director will disguise their attempts to manipulate the public. They have already done it by calling us here to get our input when we know with a hundred percent certainty our input will have minimal affect on the outcome of the process.
Their real objective is not to facilitate citizen participation in the planning or construction process, but to enable power holders to "educate" or "cure" the participants, to engineer their support. And then, when the project is approved and construction begins, the city can dismiss public outcry by saying they had a public meeting where citizens were given due consideration.
Tonight you will be told that the reconstruction of South Corinth is necessary, but it is not. The residents of Church Street were told their street’s reconstruction was necessary, but indeed, it is not. Both capital improvement projects are based on faulty assumptions about growth in Corinth and in the case of Church Street, the firm responsible for making those projections is the same firm we subsequently awarded the design contract to, which in all has cost us 3.2 million dollars. Clearly that is a conflict of interest.
The people of Amity Village should request a brick wall be placed between their homes and the new road, cutting off their residential streets from cut-through traffic and blocking noise from both the highway and the new thoroughfare that South Corinth and Lake Sharon will be when all the capital improvement projects are complete. The residents affected by the reconstruction of South Corinth Street should ask to see a traffic study, a tree protection and mitigation plan, and should be reasonably sure that the city’s selection of a firm to design and construct the project is not a conflict of interest.
Tonight the city will present the plans for South Corinth as favorably as they can. They may even make promises or agree to concessions in design. I urge everyone here tonight to get in writing whatever promises or concessions to which the city agrees.
Let me repeat, whatever the city promises you, demand to see it in writing. The residents along Church Street wished they had done the same, so this advice comes by the wisdom of those who are now suffering at the hands of the city’s relentless pursuit to waste our tax dollars, ruin our property values, and destroy our quality of life in Corinth.
The city’s website proudly boasts that Corinth is a “Gateway to Success.” A gateway, my friends. Corinth is an opening that you pass through to get somewhere else? That is how our city officials, our mayor and council, our city manager – That is how they see us, unworthy of being a destination.
And that is why they push to build thoroughfares through our neighborhoods. Just look at the images below to see what you have to look forward to when the city decides that your neighborhood is the next victim.
You remember Church Drive, don't you?
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