Riley’s Reality TV
We’d rather drink steaming mugs of sludge from 100-year-old sewers than watch City Hall’s annual spring budget-passing ritual. But clicking our TV remote a couple of weeks ago, we happened upon Channel 2 and grew mesmerized by 5th District Councilman Terry Riley’s performance during a March 8 budget committee meeting. As is often the case in Kansas City, the main topic was garbage — and Riley did a little trash-talking of his own. His awe-inspiring rant was too long to reprint in its entirety, but here are a few choice excerpts.
On illegal dumping: “While we’re busy talking about Kemper Arena and the Sprint Center and all these other places, they are still dirty, nasty, crappy-looking neighborhoods where people continue to dump stuff every day.”
On hiring 10 “trash cops”: “We’re just playing games with the public if we just have two people out there monitoring this. This is a big game. Every time the budget comes, everyone hits their fists on the desk. ‘We’re going to get tough on crime. We’re going to be out there stopping people from dumping illegally in the community.’ You know what? We talk about the same issues every single year.”
On downtown revitalization: “With all the construction going on downtown, I just feel that this year, we should just really focus our attentions on these neighborhoods because these are the people who make it happen. … I mean, they say, ‘Well, Terry, man, that’s great what’s going on, but, by the way, I have another couch in my front yard today. By the way, I was listening to gunshots last night.'”
On quality of life: “You have AK-47s on the street. After every gun show we have here in Kansas City, there’s another 20, 30 AK-47s on the street. It’s spooky. At night you hear gunshots, you turn all your lights off in the house, and you just wait for it to be over…. We have senior citizens running in their houses every night trying to beat the dark, trying to beat the night, so that they can get in and put those five or six locks that they have on their doors, a board or steel bar across it so that they can feel safe at night.”
Whoa. If we heard this kind of truth-telling on Channel 2 more often, we’d be hooked on the government channel.
Did You Say April 16?
Among the many problems over at H&R Block seems to be the use of pronouns in constructing sentences. We’re talking about the difference between they and we. Of course, the folks at Block are accountants, so us writin’ types will try to help them correct their billboard campaign, which should read: “We make mistakes. They fix them.”
If they got the words a bit messed up, it wouldn’t be the first time Block had a problem with the basics. Block employees revealed in February that the company had previously miscalculated expenses for state income taxes. The goof required the tax-prep giant to break out its calculators to figure out earnings going back, oh, two years or so.
After that blunder, the Securities and Exchange Commission gave Block 40 days to file the new calculations.
Yeah, well, working the abacus is a grind.
So on March 27, Block admitted to the SEC that it was going to miss the deadline. The company instead filed the papers five days later and admitted in the filings that it owed another $30.5 million in state taxes, says company spokeswoman Denise Sposato.
When asked about the we–they mix-up on the billboard, Sposato suggested we call another Block flack, who didn’t return our call. We understand. Numbers are hard to remember.
