Media Monday - 20070129 Part II

The “Tilghman Times” ran a very special piece on Sunday morning. It started on the front page and ran for a full page. For such a special piece, it needed a very special author. The powers that be chose their chief apologist for the Tilghman Administration, city editor Joe Carmean. The subject: Mike Dunn won’t seek re-election because people are mean to him.

Mike’s PROUD of his accomplishments. Let’s see. The city is mortgaged to the hilt. They have to lease their new fire station because they can’t afford to borrow any more money. They have however, managed to borrow MILLIONS to hand over in developer reimbursements. They are handing over TENS OF MILLIONS in developer subsidies. Are there any more accomplishments?

You bet. The city can’t fully staff it’s police department. Dunn claims that Gary Comegys is somehow personally responsible for a $6,000 raise to each police officer. While I can’t prove that this is totally not true, I have been able to glean this much from the budget; the police were given a 2% raise last year. There’s just one problem. Mr. Comegys managed to have the raise deferred for six months. That translates into a 1% raise in this fiscal year. I don’t know whose pocket the $6,000 per officer went into but I can’t find it in the city budget. Are there more accomplishments?

Tax increases. Water and sewer increases. A new tax increase is planned for FY ‘08. Ditto for sewer and water fees. There’s the tipping fee.

What do the voters receive? Congested roads. Overcrowded schools. Understaffed police, fire and EMS. While Mr. Dunn claims that “the schools are the county’s problem” he adds to the problem every time Messrs. Dunn and Comegys approve a new annexation for a subdivision.

That brings us to development. Mr. Dunn claims that they ended developer reimbursements. I guess we’ll never know, because he’s leaving office and they just borrowed a few million more to hand over to developers, including the family of his campaign treasurer. Up until this month, every time a developer hooked up to water and sewer the average taxpayer subsidized the connection charge. We still don’t know for sure if the new fees will fully cover the city’s costs.

Mr. Dunn claims that the “great 4-2 debate” on rental housing is a problem of the past. This is true to a point. The new Housing Board, dominated by slumlords allows landlords to basically do what they please. Citizen concern hasn’t gone away, it is just re-directed to other things. While Mr. Dunn berates citizens who dare dissent from his point of view at council meetings, he seems to think that when citizens quit attending meetings they no longer are concerned.

What I found most disturbing about Mr. Carmean’s PR piece about Mr. Dunn was that Mr. Dunn would bring up charges of drug dealing, drug use and wife swapping. To the best of my knowledge, I have never read any of those accusations in print. While Mr. Dunn screams McCarthyism, perhaps he doth protest too much.

This brings us to his criticism of the “blogs”. He makes the false claim that City Council candidates Tim Spies and Terry Cohen are “notorious bloggers”. This is not true. Of course Mr. Dunn has rarely been an advocate of truth. While Mike attacks Joe Albero’s Salisbury News he attempts to lump all weblogs into one large class. While I was a critic of some of Joe’s early work I believe that he has become a true credit to his community. The city’s crime problem and the recent grafitti problem would not be written about in the “Tilghman Times” if Joe had not made an issue of it. I also note that Delmarva Dealings wasn’t mentioned. I have publicly and privately told Mr. Dunn and several members of the “Tilghman Times” staff to name one post printed here that was inaccurate. Mr. Dunn’s criticism of DD and the other blogs seems to boil down to “they’re mean and don’t agree with me”. Grow up Mike. Take a vacation and retire off of your profits from Sassafras.
As an amusing aside, Mike has repeatedly stated that he “never reads the blogs”. If that were true, on what basis does he criticize Joe Albero, or anyone else?

I would expect nothing else from Joe Carmean. I would expect little more from the other editors and publisher of the “Tilghman Times”. Perhaps the blatant pimping for the Tilghman administration is why I quit reading other Gannett publications. I read the “Tilghman Times” primarily for amusement and my wife has to have those sales ads. I just figure that you can’t trust the Wilmington paper or USA Today when the same owners permit coverage that is biased beyond recognition. I expect bias from a newspaper. What I don’t expect is total distortion of fact (as in their coverage of the old mall rezoning) or full page editorials run on the front page and represented as “news” (i.e. the piece reporting that Dunn will not seek re-election).

Keep up the good work guys and gals. I usually need something to write about for Monday and I lover alliteration.

Technorati Tags: Salisbury, politics, salisburypolitics, TilghmanTimes, Gannett, DunnDeal, GaryComegys

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