You know what you ought to do, I said.
“What’s that?” Hermann replied.
Raffle it off, I said.
“Raffle it off?”
Yes, raffle off the 32-inch, high-definition monster, I told her. The TV that Hermann didn’t ask for that was bought on her behalf anyway.
She refused it, she said, because it seemed extravagant in light of all the cuts in city services and the lofty rhetoric about the need for fiscal responsibility.
Seemed? It was extravagant, arrogant and more, considering that city workers are getting pink slips.
Office renovations were one thing. Some new chairs and all the rest, you could justify.
But brand new Sony Bravias in every council member’s office? No, that was going over the top, Hermann and colleagues Terry Riley and Ed Ford said when they heard about it a few months ago.
And Hermann went one further. She wouldn’t allow one to be installed in her office.
But the city’s Capital Improvements Management Office bought one for her anyway. And when she opted to continue relying on her 14-inch portable, the CIMO folks decided to store her flat-panel away for the day when someone takes her place.
Which ought to be in about three years, as City Council members are limited to two four-year terms.
“They tell me we’re only temporary employees,” she said.
Which is true. But temporary employees with a difference. As elected officials, some of them actually understand the importance of symbolism where a bureaucrat might not.
As a former bureaucrat, the mayor is famously without a sense of the symbolic. But he wasn’t in line for a new TV, so let’s leave him out of it.
However, Hermann gets the whole symbolism thing. Big TVs may have great picture quality, but they don’t look good.
So maybe Hermann can persuade her fellow council members to send the TVs back to the store.
Or maybe just take my suggestion and sell raffle tickets to city residents.
Why let Hermann’s unwanted TV sit in a box for three years? Give it a new home. I’d keep selling raffle tickets until there was enough money raised to cover the full nut for all 15 of those unnecessarily expensive TV sets.
At $1,200 each delivered and installed, that’s about $18,000. How hard it would it be to sell 18,000 raffle tickets at a dollar apiece in a city of 450,000?
If sales somehow fell short, they could always open the raffle to other city governments.
For instance, I checked with Overland Park, the second most populous city in the area. And guess what?
Even if the poor devils on the OP City Council had 32-inch flat screens — which they don’t — they wouldn’t have offices to put them in. All 12 council members share a single office, while the mayor has one to himself.
“Neither has a TV set,” Deputy City Manager Kristy Stallings said.
They’re not a whole lot better off in KCK. Commissioners of the Unified Government share a TV set in their conference room, but it is not a flat-panel.
“We’re lucky it’s even color,” an aide to the commissioners said.
It was much the same in St. Louis and other cities I checked with. So it seems as if Kansas City Council members are either very lucky, or you are free to fill in the blank with your own interpretation.
So I’m all for the raffle, though as I understand it, there may be some other ideas out there.
When I last checked with CIMO spokesman Sean Demory on Tuesday, he was still extolling the wisdom of the purchase.
The TVs, after all, have a lifetime warranty, he said.
“That being said,” Demory wrote in an e-mail, “we are discussing all options and have not ruled out any possibility as far as use, placement or removal of televisions from Council chambers.”
Hey, want to buy a raffle ticket?
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