The Cropp hits the fans
Come to Richmond, Linda W. Cropp! The D.C. Council president's last-minute change of heart on the deal to bring baseball to Washington is classic Richmond material. She had assurances on every concern she'd mustered, but, as she put it, ""as I listened to the debate...the concerns I've had over the past couple of months kind of percolated."
Well, we're all waking up and smelling the coffee now. Cropp could have negotiated this deal ten months ago, when everything was on the table, but I guess that was would have interfered with watching swim meets. Now she's very close to putting the kibosh on the return of baseball to D.C., and all the tax revenue that would have meant.
Yes, the stadium is to be publically financed, but that's a bit of a misnomer—only the top 11 percent of District businesses were to pay the tax; not a cent was coming out of the General Fund from which the D.C. government is funded. Almost unanimously, those businesses were quite enthusiastic about the prospect of baseball in town. The city was to keep all the revenue from taxes within the stadium, plus it would have a major part of the waterfront rebuilt and redeveloped for free, basically.
So I'd like to extend an invitation to Cropp to come here. She may be, as Thomas Boswell says, "bush league," but she's miles better than the turkeys we've got down here. Outgoing mayor Rudy McCollum, the lamest of these gobblers, defended the council's decision to give city manager Calvin Jamison a raise before his position is eliminated at the end of the month. That means he'll get an even bigger severance package for making Richmond a worse city. Crime's up. Population's down. The schools are steadily slipping away.
Our only hope seems to be a mayor who's acting more and more like a dictator, and I gotta say, I don't think that's such a bad approach. It's too bad Tony Wilson can't seize the reins in the manner Doug Wilder seems determined to do. I can only hope that Wilder's able to make Richmond a better place for middle-class folks as he makes the trains run on time—but he's gonna have to fight a few Linda Cropps of his own to achieve either goal. Nine of them, to be precise.
Well, we're all waking up and smelling the coffee now. Cropp could have negotiated this deal ten months ago, when everything was on the table, but I guess that was would have interfered with watching swim meets. Now she's very close to putting the kibosh on the return of baseball to D.C., and all the tax revenue that would have meant.
Yes, the stadium is to be publically financed, but that's a bit of a misnomer—only the top 11 percent of District businesses were to pay the tax; not a cent was coming out of the General Fund from which the D.C. government is funded. Almost unanimously, those businesses were quite enthusiastic about the prospect of baseball in town. The city was to keep all the revenue from taxes within the stadium, plus it would have a major part of the waterfront rebuilt and redeveloped for free, basically.
So I'd like to extend an invitation to Cropp to come here. She may be, as Thomas Boswell says, "bush league," but she's miles better than the turkeys we've got down here. Outgoing mayor Rudy McCollum, the lamest of these gobblers, defended the council's decision to give city manager Calvin Jamison a raise before his position is eliminated at the end of the month. That means he'll get an even bigger severance package for making Richmond a worse city. Crime's up. Population's down. The schools are steadily slipping away.
Our only hope seems to be a mayor who's acting more and more like a dictator, and I gotta say, I don't think that's such a bad approach. It's too bad Tony Wilson can't seize the reins in the manner Doug Wilder seems determined to do. I can only hope that Wilder's able to make Richmond a better place for middle-class folks as he makes the trains run on time—but he's gonna have to fight a few Linda Cropps of his own to achieve either goal. Nine of them, to be precise.
posted by Andrew Beaujon at 15:34
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