Tuesday, September 29, 2009

"After you, Alphonse.", "No, you first, my dear Gaston!" ARE HEALY & SLIMAN CANTON'S "ALPHONSE & GASTON" ACT?



Stumbling and bumbling birthed in the soup of political arrogance.

Are Mayor Healy and Annexation/Civil Service Director Sliman the perfect match for the stumbling/bumbling going on at Canton City Hall?

Looks like it.

William J. "Arrogance Personified" Healy, II has been down right goofy as the "decider-in-chief" for the Hall of Fame city.   He revels in having graduated from the New York University Stern School of Business with a Masters of Business Administration and coming home to Canton to assume his rightful has the King of Canton.

Sam "Darth Vader to the Townships" Sliman looks down his nose to the rubes (as evidenced by him attributing to himself the aforemention Darth Vader attribution) out in the hinterland of Stark County.

He and the complicit Randy Gonzalez (Jackson Township fiscal officer, Stark County Democratic Party chair and deputy clerk of courts - Canton Municipal Court) have concocted this notion of the huge metropolis of CanJackson (Canton and Jackson Township) that by virtue of their combined largeness are thereby entitled to steam roll the rest of Stark County.

In an adaptation of the Alphonse and Gaston comic strip of  yore, the SCPR sees Healy and Sliman as deferring to one another in their arrogance.

If one looks at the definition of arrogance, one finds that arrogance is born of insecurity rather than self-confidence grounded in thorough preparation for the task at hand and for the tasks that loom in the future.

Healy and Sliman are working to create a culture (by ridding the administration of "independent types" like Bernabei and Nesbitt) at City Hall that is dragging the once great city into a financial/economic cesspool. 

The latest Healy/Sliman arrogence-bred stumbling/bumbling is summed up in an incident whereby Civil Director Sliman's clearly demonstrated an inability to do basic administrative/legal ministerial work in a tragic-comedic exercise of laying off cadet firemen in order to help the city save money in a desperate attempt to survive without going bankrupt.

 Healy and Sliman are negative leaders; a perverse form of leadership.

Cut,cut, cut, cut and cut some more.  And that is all Healy and Sliman can do now.  For they have dug themselves a huge hole over nearly two years in power.

Because of their failure to correct the fundamental errors of the Creighton administration (which Sliman was also part of) and, moreover,  because their failure to develop a sound, positive economic growth program (annexation is negative, temporary economic growth - over the long haul) in the Healy administration; Canton is in a downward spiral.  A crash landing is just over the horizon.

Matters have gotten so desperate these days that Sliman has been inquiring of Plain Township for the right to compete with Sheriff Swanson to handle police services for Plan.

No way would Plain ever agree to that scenario. 

Plain is government done right.  Canton is government done wrong.

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