WackyLeakes
It’s like WikiLeaks, only better. Nobody has to steal any top-secret documents; it’s all out there in the open, at least every other week. What’s amazing is that Mecklenburg Commissioner Vilma Leake, a former school board member, continues to get away with it, year after year dating back several, spouting increasingly inane gibberish from the dais and drawing only the occasional odd look, mostly of embarrassment, from her colleagues.
This time around it was Leake’s response to an update of Superintendent Peter Gorman’s recommended budget cuts of nearly $100 million for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. After hearing the lengthy and detailed report, commissioners were asked to send any questions they had to County Manager Harry Jones, who would forward them to Gorman.
While that seemed a reasonable process to the other commissioners, Leake lashed out, as she has on previous occasions, both at school board members and her own fellow board members for not communicating better – with her.
Leake has chaired an ad hoc committee designed to facilitate improved communication between the county board and school board, but delegates from both bodies have roundly dismissed it, leaving Leake in a steam. She was at full boil Wednesday night.
“I’m lost for any degree of trust or respect for this body,” Leake fumed. “I’m just hurting because Johnny can’t read, and Johnny’s going to drop out of school, and Johnny’s going to be in jail, and we’re going to have to take care of Johnny in jail.
“This makes me feel like this might be part of a plan to make sure that we keep some people in jobs in that area of incarceration,” Leake opined.
So, okay, here we have a county commissioner essentially accusing the sheriff and the superintendent of conspiring to make sure kids can’t learn to read, so those kids end up in jail, so the sheriff can keep himself and his buddies gainfully employed. And nobody says a word. Not even Commissioner Jim Pendergraph, the county’s former sheriff and good friends with its current one, raises the slightest protest.
Wonderful.
Extra credit wonderfulness: Reflecting on projections that show the state budget shortfall pegged at $3.7 billion, leading to what schools officials say could be at least a 10 percent reduction in state funding for CMS, Commissioner Dumont Clarke opined that folks might be jumping the gun with doom-and-gloom forecasts.
The solution for a sunnier outlook: keep paying a 1% sales tax and corporate and personal income surtaxes that are set to expire this year.
“If I just paid the same taxes to the state that I’m currently paying right now, that deficit would be only about half of what it’s projected to be,” Clarke said.
“I doubt that will happen, so the planning they’re doing for worst-case scenario is right,” Clarke said. “But I, for one, am perfectly willing to keep paying the taxes that I’m paying right now, tomorrow, to keep them from having to do what they’re having to do.”
Responded Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts, “Thank you, Commissioner Clarke, for your support of education, I think.”
“It is,” Clarke affirmed.
Problem solved. Keep paying those taxes, citizen.
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