Community 7 Television
The scene of several crimes, figuratively speaking.
Ed Kemmick is on vacation, visiting his granddaughter in a distant state, which means he won’t be writing his Prairie Lights column this week.
Which is too bad, because Ed made the mistake of keeping up with the news in Billings while he was on the road. As stories dribbled out about the City Council’s marathon meeting Tuesday night, Ed became more and more outraged, as well as somewhat despondent, which is the last thing he expected to be on a vacation to see his granddaughter.
Isn’t this the same city that recently sent a delegation to Sioux Falls, S.D., in hopes of learning how Billings might become a better place to live?
“Hell,” Ed said to himself, “we might as well send a delegation to Kabul. At least that way, when the powers that be do absolutely nothing constructive, or worse, take actions that set the city back, we can still proudly use the slogan, ‘The Magic City: Way Fewer Car Bombings Than Kabul.’”
Ed Kemmick, who should have written a column.
If Ed had been able to pull himself away from his granddaughter, who deserved his undivided attention, he would have worked hard to craft a column demonstrating conclusively that the City Council vote to kill the pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks was appallingly shortsighted.
He would also have attempted to show how the vote by six City Council members to close their eyes, click their heels and just wish the non-discrimination ordinance would go away was even more shortsighted, not to mention craven.
On the matter of the bridge, had he had the time, Ed would have written about the nearly 13-year process that countless people took part in to make that bridge a reality. He might have reminisced about the two coal board meetings (or was it three?) he covered, at which council members, police officers, legislators and Chamber of Commerce representatives pleaded for coal board funding, speaking eloquently about the need for the bridge.
But no. Instead, as Ed would love to have said in the Prairie Lights column he doesn’t have time to write, a passel of mostly new council members decided it wasn’t even worthwhile to bother learning why so many people had spent so much time pushing this project.
Ed would have pointed out how community-minded council members in earlier times had already approved projects to build trails up the Rims and under Main Street. Many years from now, if we’re lucky, a bridge might be built over the tracks, and Billings’ slowly growing network of bike-pedestrian trails will no longer dead-end at the largest remaining obstacle in the city.
Ed would have suggested placing a plaque on that bridge, reading: “Here, but for ignorance and laziness, we might have had a bridge long before this, for much less money.”
Prudence would have called for attempting to redesign the project, waiting to call for bids at a later date — anything but giving a lethal injection to a project on which so much time, effort and forethought had been expended.
But Ed is on vacation.
So, apparently, was the courage of our council members, or six of them, anyway, who voted to delay action on the non-discrimination ordinance.
Ed went to Community 7 Television’s archives to watch the relevant portion of the council meeting — on vacation, God help him! — and he was damned if knew exactly what the intent of Councilman Shaun Brown’s initiative really was, though Brown did communicate a vague hope that the issue would just go away.
Mayor Tom Hanel, who broke the tie, indefinitely postponing action on the NDO, was a bit more direct, saying he had “a problem believing this is the huge problem it is said to be.”
“It,” apparently is discrimination against gay, bisexual and transgender people. Hanel also said the issue is just “too sensitive” at this time. If only he and the five people who voted with him were just a bit more sensitive, they might have discerned that Billings is not quite the open, accepting town they seem to think it is.
If they were a bit more sensitive, Ed would have argued, they might have noticed that a lot of the opposition to the ordinance made it sickeningly obvious how much hatred and discrimination there still is around here.
But Ed is on vacation. We apologize for his failure to address these pressing subjects and ask, in the name of his granddaughter, for your forbearance.
