In my posts about the individual candidates, I said that at least two of them were obviously strong choices for our city manager position. In a piece in Connect today, http://www.connectsavannah.com/news/article/103567/, Patrick Rodgers writes about the original mandate from council in terms of job qualifications, about city manager positions generally, and about the information that Affion provided. It’s a great piece of analysis that addresses many of your questions.

Sorry to use potty-mouth on your blog, Bill, but Van, really? Are you shitting me?

That’s the kind of criteria that really screams “good job” to you?

I would assume that the least a guy could do after being paid tens of thousands of dollars to compile data on a handful of candidates (and apparently, not very well it seems), would be to cough the highlights of their resumes back up with relative ease – especially when knowing you were about to be grilled by your clients.

This is the kind of blinkard, Phillistine pig-ignorance that has come to define the methodology which has run rampant in our City Hall for far too long.

Let me get this straight – it’s a requirement that Savannah can’t (or won’t) hire a City Manager who does not have a Master’s Degree in Public Administration?

Then why is Wayne Cauthen even included in this batch of contenders?

Why is any one of us wasting a moment even considering his other credentials?

What is going on with any of this that doesn’t at least carry the taint of incompetence or of a fix?

Instead of calling the GBI to find out who spilled the beans, they need to call the Better Business Bureau to help them get their money back from Affion, and then start fresh. If Small-Toney is ACTUALLY legally eligible to keep her temporary position, then let her stay till they find a permanent replacement.

If not, then fire her ASAP and promote the next person in line to hold that position. Sound like a really bad idea? Well, sometimes folks just have to take their lumps, deal with the hand they’ve dealt themselves and take the consequences of their actions or inactions.

The overwhelming presumption that is not implicitly written in any of these SMN articles, but is hollered about ad nauseum in less than polite terms by the crackers (yep, said it) who leave nasty, thinly-veiled race-baiting bromides in the paper’s online Comments section, is that the black community in Savannah will automatically vote again like mindless automatons for Van, Edna, Clifton or anyone else already in office who looks vaguely like themselves.

I would really like to think that is not the case, however a longstanding joke like Van seemingly continues to enjoy broad support from his base regardless of how embarrassingly he conducts himself in public.

Is it not possible that there are ANY other candidates from that part of our community that might come forward as a truly viable alternative – who are also noticeably more honest, open, polite and demonstrably interested in uniting Savannah’s disparate factions, rather than dividing them?