A veteran City Hall critic this morning posed a rich and timely question:
If a community meeting to talk over the fairly abstract topic of affordable housing and the even grayer prospects of the Landlord Tenant Mediation Board, why not strike now? Call the meeting for a few days ahead, soon as legally allowable?
“Here is what you have,” the critic said.
“Since nothing was settled, or improved, at last Monday’s City Council meeting, why couldn’t the Council follow up in an efficient manner instead of hoping it will dry up and float away?
“Oh, no,” he said with a shake of his head. “They took the easy way, the blame-free way.
“My opinion is that scheduling a gathering of an unknown number of people, at an undetermined venue, on two illy-defined subjects is a recipe for hoping all of last Monday’s jabber about rent control vanishes.
“Sadly, it could,” he said.
The official City Hall explanation:
With Christmas less than a fortnight away, traditionally no substantive business is conducted in the last weeks of the old year and often in the first weeks of the new.
• The meeting has to be organized.
• It must be publicly noticed to a basket’s worth of proper parties.
• Meanwhile, a Council member must announce he or she has fire in the belly for such an amorphous gathering. No such flames were detected Monday.
Let us reconvene here on Halloween and re-evaluate the progress.
