I don’t know if that happened here, but I do know we did not follow a good process. Since
we haven’t followed a better process, we haven’t had the chance to discuss how we go
about naming things and selecting which folks to honor in this way. Personally, I’d like to
see a better process developed, where we establish more thorough criteria for measuring
the impact of the folks to be honored, coming up with a list of candidates and then coming
up with a list of candidate projects that would make sense for each of those folks. I’d like
to see more community input on these topics. As my colleague pointed out, it’s Council
prerogative to do anything they want to name and not follow the process. That’s totally
valid, it doesn’t make it a good thing to do or the right way to do it. What I don’t like
seeing, is a body of eight folks rewarding their friends and supporters. It almost feels like
they’re setting up to have things named after themselves later. I’d like to see this all
depoliticized, but as I said perhaps that politicization is what’s on the seat. Since it was
pushed that way tonight, and since they chose to argue against the consideration of more
meaningful names for this park and a more meaningful location to honor Mayor Hallisey,
they’ve decided to make this a referendum on their friend, the former mayor. So, while I
would prefer to not speak negatively about him, it bears talking about who he really was
and what his legacy truly is, since we made it a referendum. My experience with the
former mayor, and that of many folks who have reached out to me since this agenda was
published, is not the same as those who voted to name the park after him tonight. This is a
man who cursed, with an open mic, the entire rest of the city council as “the rudest bunch
of expletive people,” simply because a vote didn’t go his way. This is a man who implied
racism on behalf of the rest of the council as to the reason why the council chose to name
one road after a family, instead of a portion of another road. This is a man who threatened
to come after a fellow council member with both barrels because he felt slighted on a
different vote. This is a man who tried to initiate needless battles between the city and the
county to further a personal grudge with county elected officials. This is a man who
accused me of a coup, when what I was doing was the opposite, and I asked staff to
schedule and announce a special meeting to forgive his absences so he wouldn’t be
declared as having vacated the position. This is a man that an attorney hired by our ethics
committee found he used foul and mean language to refer to council members and had
difficulty controlling his temper. Finally, this is a man that on multiple occasions degraded
and insulted our hometown heroes in the volunteer fire department and police department.
While in general I don’t believe in naming things after living folks, as they may yet
disappoint us with the rest of their life and their remaining actions, I realize not all share
that position, but I would hope one criteria we could use when deciding to name something
after folks, is if this is someone we would want our kids to model their behavior after.
When it comes to former mayor Hallisey, I can’t say that. I would have preferred to not
speak negatively about him as he’s no longer in office and not of consequence. Since we
made it a referendum on the man, this needed to be said. I also find it shameful we had to
do this with an item sponsored by a council member who cowardly chose to punch out from
this meeting and not stay tied in for the rest of the meeting after he got that vote through.
This is a council member who did something so egregious over the last few days that our
police chief had to identify this abuse of his position. I’m going to read an email
summarizing that action from our police chief to our city manager. “Sir, On Monday,
February 24, 2025, at approximately 9:41 AM, I received a phone call from Councilman
