News
Anyone who’s watched a Metro Council meeting in progress, for lack of a better word, has entertained somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind the thought of simultaneously turning off all council members’ microphones. No more pontificating and posturing, an end to aimless rambling and a long-overdue break from so much hot, loud air. Just imagine what the city could get done if the council worked in silence.
Well, a few weeks ago, someone gave it a try. At the body’s Sept. 20 meeting, council members Harold White, Ludye Wallace, Charlie Tygard and J.B. Loring pulled on the microphones that rest in each member’s desk, only to discover that someone had unplugged their cords, in the process trapping the cords inside a desk wall panel. The men, it seems, were muted. Vice Mayor Howard Gentry called a rare recess to see if the problem, if that’s what you want to call it, could be fixed; it couldn’t, and the four council members spent the rest of the night sharing microphones with their neighbors.
Who would play such a prank on these public servants? While thousands of Nashvillians certainly have the motive, and many the means, most folks don’t have the opportunity to sneak around in City Hall disabling government equipment before a high-profile meeting. Likely, sources say, it was a case of council-member-on-council-member crime, a stunt just dumb enough to be an inside job.
Gentry, whose leadership of this council could become quite the 2007 mayoral campaign albatross, wasn’t happy. He reportedly told an executive committee meeting that he was “99.9 percent sure” he knew who did it but couldn’t prove it. Still, no one came forward. The repair bill, which the Metro Clerk paid last week, totaled $144. Not exactly government at its most efficient. “It was a costly and embarrassing thing to do, and it cost the city money,” Gentry tells the Scene. “Those are not the type of actions the public or anyone else should expect to see from members of the council.”
Very believable rumors circulated that District 2’s Jamie Isabel was behind the lame stunt, a charge he emphatically denies. “No, I didn’t do it, and I do not know who did it,” he says. Others speculated that Chris Whitson, who resigned from the council last month to avoid a legal conflict of interest, played the prank as a bit of farewell mischief. “Chris Whitson is too intelligent to do that, and I like to think I am too intelligent to do that,” says Isabel, accurately appraising Whitson.
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
The case may go unsolved. But cutting the size of the Metro Council in half, as Whitson and now Mayor Bill Purcell have proposed, shouldn’t be a very tough sell to a public that watches such antics play out biweekly. Who needs pranks when the mute button is close at hand?