Response to "Charlene"
In TheSacNews.com piece, "It turns out, Jim Johnston was kind of a scumbag in 2006 too" We learned that Jim Johnston took a 10 page ordinance entering into the franchise agreement with Mediacom that the public didn't know the city council was about to vote on (unless they individually went down to the city office and endured a little paranoid, angry questioning to find out,) and moved to waive the second and third readings of that ordinance.
Today, (January 21, 2010,) I, (Curtis Bloes,) went to the Sac City Library to see what the Sac Sun, (you know, the "official newspaper") had to say about the 15 year 10-page ordinance that Jim Johnston apparently thought it was appropriate to not give a second look.
Because of the way that our public figures are in the habit of sneaking into the libray and selectively tearing out bits of embarrassing facts about them from their Sac Sun collection, I wasn't really expecting to find anything.
What I did find answered the question of why no-one has bothered. This is the beginning and the end of what I found published in the October 31, 2006 Sac Sun regarding the topic:
"The council approved an or-
dinance giving Mediacom the
cable franchise."
!!??
Read it again, you have enough time.
Honestly, are you surprised that you never heard of this? Even now sitting councilman Jim Frederick admitted on December 28, 2009 that he didn't know the agreement stretched all the way out to the year 2021.
The Sac City Council pays the Sac Sun thousands of dollars per year to publish their legal notices. As recently as this week, (January 11, 2010) they are on video basically asking the editor of that paper write what amounts to a newsvertisement for them to find interested parties to participate in the Community Gardens. That casual act of our government being in control of the paper's message leads me to question how the conversation that led to the above still-birth of a news story went must have gone when no cameras were running.
It's too bad (for us) that the cold hard eye of the camera wasn't scrutinizing the Fiegenschuh office in 2006.
I wonder if we'll have flying cars before this thing expires?
Copyright (c)2007-2010 Curtis Bloes
All Rights Reserved
Me too Curtis....Pretty sad that we are all taking it in the rear (to put it mildly) with Mediacom. hmmm makes one wonder.....was there kickbacks involved?
ReplyDeleteI have not found anything that suggests anything criminal transpired. Those that participated seem to have been guilty only of trying to make their own jobs easier instead of serving the public in the best way possible, with Jim Johnston being the one leading the charge into secrecy.
ReplyDeleteBe aware, though, that the people of Sac City have willingly allowed people like Jim Johnston to do this to them. Certainly the paper is guilty of not informing us of what is really happening inside the Sac City Council Chambers, but you can get around that by attending the meetings yourself, which is not happening.
I guess what I’m saying here is that we all bear part of the blame for this franchise agreement. Every four years we have the opportunity to vote the people responsible for it out, yet here we are, two elections out and Jim Johnston, the worst offender without whom the public would have had a greater opportunity to object, was put in office once again by the 10% of the population who are either employed by the city or directly related to someone employed by the city.
In other words, we get what we vote for… or in a non-presidential election year, what the roughly 190 friends and family of the city employees vote for. ...And what we did in the last election via our non-participation was to send a message that we are in favor of the franchise agreement.
Well I did vote but am not able to attend the city council meetings as I work every Monday. Guess that is where the SAC SUN would be the place to getinfo on city business. Want to say Thanks Curtis for getting the information to those of us unable to get it elsewhere.
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