Now I want to start this week with something that made me genuinely glad, which does not happen as often as it used to, and that is the news about Community Transit paying their mechanics real wages — up to fifty-nine dollars an hour, which, yes, and also sixteen thousand dollars in incentives just for showing up in the first year — and I will tell you why this matters to me personally, which is that I remember when the 29 bus used to run late every single Thursday for about four months back in, I want to say 1997, and nobody could ever explain why, and I always suspected it was because they could not keep good mechanics because they were not paying good wages, and I could not prove that then but I feel like I can prove it now retroactively — that's how that works — and the point is that the people who actually live here depend on those buses and they depend on them being fixed and on time, and if it takes fifty-nine dollars an hour to make that happen then frankly we should have been doing this years ago.
And another thing — Mayor Franklin gave her State of the City address, her ninth one, and I have sat with that number for a few days now, nine, and I remember when the State of the City address was held somewhere you could just walk into without planning ahead, and I am not saying anything about venues or decisions being made about venues, I am just saying I remember it differently, and the mayor mentioned a Boys and Girls Club location going into Walter E. Hall Park, which — do you know how long the people who actually live here have been asking for something real to happen at that park — and I will circle back on the specifics because I want to get this right — but the point is that a Boys and Girls Club is exactly the kind of thing that makes a park feel like it belongs to everyone again, and I think that is worth more than any ribbon-cutting I have seen in recent memory, and I have seen a lot of ribbon-cuttings, and some of those scissors were very large, which I also have thoughts about.
Now here is where I have to mention the City Council and their April meeting schedule, because they have posted agendas for April 1, 8, and 15, plus a Budget and Finance Committee and a Parks and Built Environment session, which sounds like a lot until you realize that is just — that is the job, that is what the job is, and I bring this up only because one of those meetings is about parks and built environment, and if the Boys and Girls Club at Walter E. Hall is going through any kind of process, then I hope the people who actually live near that park know those meetings are happening and show up, because decisions get made in rooms when people are not in them and I have seen that happen more times than I care to count — and I am not pointing at anyone specifically, I am pointing at a situation, and you know who you are — and also the economic recovery task force that apparently started back in 2020 is still being talked about in these updates and I just think it is worth asking, as someone who watched several storefronts go dark and come back as something unrecognizable, whether recovery means the same thing to everyone in that room, because to the people who actually live here it tends to mean something pretty specific and it tends to involve being able to afford to stay.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.