Hat of a Citizen

When I retired I became much more interested in local politics.  I attended city council meetings and after seeing what I thought were issues with the existing board of Aldermen, I decided to run. I lost. But the problems I saw still exist. In fact I was not the only person who saw issues with the existing board. Every seat was challenged and we all lost to the incumbents, except the mayor. The former mayor won reelection. The problem is the mayor does not make decisions, he is a weak mayor and just runs the meetings. The Aldermen make all the decisions. I attended the first board meeting of the new term.  The board has tried to clean up the city ever since I have been here. I heard them give property owners time limits to clean up their properties and condemn properties that were in disrepair.  I heard citizens complain that they were ticketed for the condition of their properties but just across the street from them is a property owned by one of the aldermen. In fact it was the alderman that I ran against. The code enforcement officer has not one time ticketed that alderman for his properties.  That Alderman has a storage unit complex that is in a state of disrepair on the main road through town. He has a house across the street from the businessman that complained, because he spent 40,000 dollars fixing his property and they still wanted to ticket him and did nothing about the property across the street from him that is run down and an eyesore. This Alderman started to build a Elvis Pressley Birthplace house replica and never finished it. It also is an eyesore. The house where he lives has the roof portion of a building that fell down  and he moved it to his front yard about 1996 and has done nothing with it except to build a fence to hide it when it was complained about. This board and the code enforcement officer have done nothing about any of his many rundown properties. This is unfair and I addressed the board to point this out. I used a scripture from Proverbs that says God demands equal weights and measures.

The Lord demands accurate scales and balances;

he sets the standards for fairness. Proverbs 16:11. (NLT)
I have some other ideas that I will bring before the board, but my first concern was the partiality the board was displaying. I believe our country is in the mess that it is because Christians stood back and for the most part stayed out of politics. We see a lot of dirty politics and it seemed like politics and Christianity don't mix. In fact we are to be salt where ever we go. We are to influence society in all that we do. God bless, LVZ.
I think I will leave the hats I wear alone for a while. I have other things I want to blog about.