My Mayor Sucks

The plot thickens as Kathy Taylor will not give up e-mails or personal documents related to the federal indictment of two former managers in the Public Works Department who are accused of taking bribes; financial irregularities in Tulsa Transit; and improper training records in the fire department.

The only way for an acting mayor to conduct themselves in this situation is to cooperate fully, if only to show that he or she has nothing to hide. It seems the city council was wanting to do their own investigation and she did not want to comply. It always seems as though mayors never want to give in to the city council because of the fear that it looks like they are having to do so and that it somehow shows weakness. It really never helps matters when this happens because the city council already has federal indictments on their side thanks to the feds. So it is as if they say, “fine, you don’t want to play ball with us, not a problem”. They have just set the stage for the feds to inquire as to why they don’t want to turn over e-mails and documents. It also allows the citizens some drama for the nightly news and really hurts the validity of the mayor.

But, on the other hand, here are a group of everyday citizens getting to play detective, and in my opinion really not even qualified to look at documents. Information in those documents may be private, and so on. But here in lies the problem for the mayor. Some of the information within those documents may be worse than the original focus of the initial investigation. So, if you are a sloppy mayor with a ton of shady deals and misdeeds, if not just a couple of big ones, then you open the door for an even worse fate.

I really think that is the case in most situations. Is it the case here, time will surely tell. Where there is smoke there is fire. either way, when people get indicted and they are looking at spending their glory years away from family and friends, then all bets are off and as they say in the backrooms of the halls of justice, there is no honor among thieves.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 7:39 am and is filed under Mayors by State, Oklahoma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.