Not much to say about the performance turned in by the Mecklenburg county commissioners last night. Couldn’t duck an issue more if you had wings and webbed feet, the upshot being the plan to start building schools where they are needed was shot down by the board’s Democrats. And comparing the 2005 “no” vote on bonds to the 2001 “no” vote on the Uptown arena just boggles the mind:
“Those who find an analogy in the arena vote really don’t get it, we submit,” said Dan Bishop, a Republican commissioner. “The bond loss was not about whether to fund schools or not to fund school facilities; it was about how money is prioritized and whether it is carefully and efficiently allocated.”
Actually, now that political leaders have ignored the express wishes of the voting public and did what they wanted to all along, the analogy with the arena experience is a pretty good one. In both cases, and overwhelming majority of about 57 percent of voters turned out to say “no” to something the powers-that-be wanted done and, at the first opportunity, the powers-that-be utterly ignored that vote and did the exact opposite of what the public wanted.
That $427 million school construction number is just not going to go away any more than the plans for the Uptown arena did.
