Okay, here’s the sequence of events:
At the
21 November Carbondale City Council meeting, Mike Heck (President of the Carbondale Park District Board but speaking for himself) encouraged Councilmen (councilpeople? Ugh.) Wissmann and Haynes to abstain from the Carbondale Clean Indoor Air Act (otherwise known as the smoking ban) because of a supposed conflict of interest. Mr. Wissmann declined to abstain, but Mr. Haynes was convinced to.
At the
5 December Carbondale City Council meeting, no one mentioned conflict of interest between Wissmann’s job as part-owner and editor of the
Nightlife and Carbondale’s Halloween policy.
In the
7 December Daily Egyptian, the editorial staff wrote what I consider an asinine and insinuating editorial questioning Wissmann for not abstaining from the smoking ban vote and for pushing a Halloween policy that might secondarily or tertiarily (is that a word?) benefit his newspaper.
In the
8 December Daily Egyptian, there appeared a letter I wrote in response to the aforementioned foolish editorial. It’s purty decent, if you ask me (if you don’t follow any of the other links, follow this one; it’s kinda the whole point here. I’d repost it in full, but Dave wants these things kept short).
On...hey, it’s still December 8th, isn’t it? Things move fast. Well, today, after the letter was published, I got a couple of emails from Councilmen Fritzler and Wissmann correcting me about a couple of things in my letter, and in the sprit of full disclosure and honesty, I’ll list the corrections here, so the world can see.
First, Joel (Fritzler) rightly pointed out that no one “requires” council members to actually hold real jobs. I knew this, of course; it was a poor choice of wording. Second, Joel informed me that Haynes no longer managed Kroger West; he’s at a different Kroger’s now. I didn’t know that. Third, Chris (Wissmann) told me that he doesn’t own part of Thomas Publishing, as I thought and implied he did. He only owns part of the
Nightlife. Last—no one pointed this out to me, but I caught it myself; I implied that the DE used the word “recused” in their editorial, but I was inexcusably sloppy on this one; they did no such thing.
One more thing: Joel pointed out to me that my arbitrary example about Kroger West and rezoning actually had a fortuitous ring of truth, having to do with Kroger, CVS, and the proposed Murphysboro Wal*Mart. Does anyone have any more info on this?
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Posted by Calion to Carbondaley Dispatch at 12/8/2006 7:12:46 PM
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