Home OP-ED Why Silbiger’s Brave Call Was Right

Why Silbiger’s Brave Call Was Right

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If I were Sherlock Noonan, I probably could earn a lottery-sized bankroll this afternoon searching out the whereabouts of the School District’s vaunted bond counseling team.

Dose guys musta had wheels on dere shoes.

Those guys vanished from the scene of last evening’s School Board meeting faster than a cricket in a brushfire.

The icy slick community survey they conducted the other day would have made Nik Wallenda’s recent daring feat look chicken-hearted.

From counselor Ann Marie Nock’s whirring, swirling, twisting, nuanced, ducking, speedboating abstract description of the questions, the telephone calls to 400 handpicked likely voters sounded like a greasy Manhattan pickpocket slipperily skating down the only carved-out street in a dust-blown Kansas burg, wiping out the locals before they realized their pants grew pockets.

I am not sure whether the conversations began with Stick ‘em Up or Howdy, podner.

She sped through her presentation so blindingly fast that I had to step outside three times to a non-existent water fountain to clarify my parched throat from the wind she was throwing off.  Bugs didn’t even have time to land on my windshield. They waved and kept going.

At the only community meeting in this abortive process, a major deal was made of an invitation-only event at Lin Howe Elementary.  At first it was mysteriously private, then suddenly thrown open to the hoi polloi. It was to serve as the preview survey to the real ride ‘em, cowboy, survey by telephone a few days later.

Ms. Nock was so startlingly dismissive about describing the results of the invitation-only thing that I thought she was fleeing for her life from more Nock-Nock jokes.

Instead, the process Ms. Nock treated with disdain was the authentic joke, a sad, little scenario that should have been a mirage.

School Board member Karlo’s Silbiger seminal speech struck a rare and courageous bullseye. He flagged the flyaway bond counseling team, and the whole process, for unnecessary speeding before they skidded away again.