COLORADO SPRINGS- News on the local election PR front: The Strong Mayor ballot measure is now being pitched as the “Elected Mayor” initiative. Perhaps quite a few voters in Colorado Springs might easily be convinced that we don’t have that already, rationalizing that Mayor Lionel Rivera could not possibly reflect the community’s best.
I ran into a friend of mine downtown this morning, working on a commercial shoot to interview supporters of the aforementioned mayoral reform. They were consulting people on the street, in theory, and he asked if I’d like to be interviewed.
I laughed, “you don’t want me, I’m absolutely against it.”
“You don’t want an elected mayor” he asked.
“I’d prefer an entire city council be held accountable to its constituents. How is that less democratic than a lone ‘elected’ mayor? Right now, the developers and business cronies have to back a whole council worth of officials. They want the ‘strong mayor’ scenario so they’ll only have to buy one vote.”
A chatty tv-blonde local-news type who might have been rethinking fitting me up for a microphone chimed in “Wow, I’ve never heard that perspective before.”
“Really?” I asked with earnestness meant to imbue my incredulity as a put-down.
“I’m from Denver” she answered by way of excusing her apolitical incuriosity, and she backed away.
Though it was a Denver Agency shooting the ad, a crew member immediately noted that one of the area’s wealthiest developers just passed by to get a coffee. As I left the scene, I clocked another tanned, linen-attired real-estate mogul on his cellphone, casually overseeing the shoot from the furthest table.
‘Who’s pushing for a Colorado Springs mayor impervious to the will of voters?’
Well… in partial answer to the question Eric asked might I suggest that it might be HCA, or as better known, previously named Columbia Healthcare out of Tennessee… They got Mayor Rivera and CS city council leech Sean Paige in their pocket, so to speak.
Rivera and Sean Paige are currently pushing for Colorado Springs city owned Memorial Hospital to be privatized and given away to this for-profit heath care crook, already convicted for felony robbing Medicare of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott for info about this criminal outfit and how they robbed the ill and elderly and government funds.
‘Columbia/HCA in 1997 amid a scandal over the company’s business and Medicare billing practices; the company ultimately admitted to fourteen felonies and agreed to pay the federal government over $600 million.’
See here now for info about Sean Page’s and Mayor Rivera’s push for HCA to now take over currently publicly owned Colorado Springs Memorial Hospital…
http://www.gazette.com/articles/hospital-109157-system-memorial.html
CS newspaper, The Gazette, in this article tries to mislead folk into believing that ‘Health One’ is from Denver and is not HCA, the country’s largest private profit making health predator out of Nashville, Tennessee. Yet the article spills the beans about Paige’s and Rivera’s actions in trying to totally destroy Memorial Hospital in this town by giving it away to a convicted felon group of health mess up operators.