Message to city leaders- Joplin residents are demanding the truth - and we can handle it

Some of you will remember that for quite some time after Sam Anselm was promoted to Joplin city manager, he attempted to give residents some insight into what he was doing and what was going on in the city.

In order to do that, he posted the weekly update he provided to City Council members on the city's website. It was also e-mailed to those who had subscriptions to city news and I posted it every week on the Turner Report. For a time, it also ran on the Inside Joplin blog.

It included an itinerary of Anselm's activities, descriptions of the meetings he attended, basic information about the city, and a look ahead to things that would be happening in the near future.

Through these reports, we received an understanding not only of the city manager's job, but all of the things that go into the operation of city government.



As far as I can determine, the weekly updates stopped being posted in early 2017 after being a fixture since Anselm became city manager.

It does not make sense to think Anselm no longer updates the mayor and city council about what is going on.

It does make sense to believe that someone was not comfortable with all of this transparency that Anselm brought to Joplin residents.

Perhaps Anselm decided on his own to stop sending the public the same report he was sending to the council.

Then again, it is just as likely that the city manager's weekly updates vanished for the same reason that the Joplin Police Department's informative daily incident spotlight reports are no longer available- there are people in high places, elected and otherwise, who believe that the less the public knows the better.

If we find out that some woman was arrested and was hiding meth in her bra that makes Joplin less attractive to businesses and the kind of upper class people some of our city leaders, again both elected and otherwise, appear to believe the only ones worthy of sharing their space.

If the public discovers that Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce President Rob O'Brian and a city representative whose name was not included in the report, attended a meeting in Las Vegas (and this was included in one of the city manager's updates), it might cause people to think these people were having a good time on the taxpayers' dime.



So naturally, that is exactly the type of thing our leaders, elected and otherwise, think the public does not have any right to know.

The elimination of two regular attempts to make city government (and the use of the taxpayers' money) transparent to those who are paying the bills would be bad enough if those were the only two times that efforts were made to keep the public out of the loop.

Unfortunately, as those who have been reading the Turner Report for the past few years are fully aware, that is not the case.

We were continually misled about decisions that were arrived at during the tornado recovery process. No one ever explained how the decisions that had been made by an unelected group even before the tornado on the city's direction and goals were almost 100 percent adopted by the Citizens Advisory Recovery Team, or how city officials, including some who are still in office, gave the key to the city to a Texas con artist, rigging a bidding process to make it happen.

When outside investigators Thomas Loraine, a former U. S. Attorney, and State Auditors Thomas Schweich and Nicole Galloway uncovered information that implicated O'Brian, Mayor Michael Seibert, former City Councilman Mike Woolston and others, city officials attacked the reports that were issued by those investigators with the full participation of the Joplin Globe.

Not only did the criminal investigations Loraine, Schweich and Galloway believe should be forthcoming never occur, but even when Woolston eventually was forced to resign, three council members voted to use taxpayers' money to pay his legal fees because of his "long service" to the community.

After all of these revelations were over, not much had changed.

Woolston was no longer on the City Council, but essentially the same people who created the comedy of errors of the post-tornado era were still firmly in place, pushing the same pet projects and blaming all of their problems on the people knowing too much about what they were doing.

So once again, our bumbling leaders, elected and otherwise, have brought unwelcome publicity to the community.

This time, instead of continuing to talk about all of the wonderful things David Wallace was bringing to the city long after they knew the Wallace experiment was a miserable failure, they are trying to keep people from knowing that there are meth-using women who appear to be working hard to establish brassieres as drug paraphernalia.



That effort has brought the city into the national spotlight once more.

First it was the tornado.

Then it was because city officials were taken in by David Wallace, the pied piper of half-baked pipe dreams.

Now, it is because our leaders, elected and unelected, failed to learn their lesson- the people can handle the truth.

And now we are demanding it.

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