Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Methinks I smell a rat
Roanoke City Market Building will be closed for an undetermined amount of time after the state found "a rodent control problem."
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Shanna Flowers is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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A "fall cleanup" at the market building?
Do City Manager Darlene Burcham and her communications crew at Roanoke city hall think we have "stupid" plastered on our foreheads?
I smell more rats in the cockamamie cover-up than the rodents scurrying around inside the 86-year-old building.
Did the attempt to keep the market building mice off the front page have anything to do with the November grand opening of the nearby $66 million Taubman Museum of Art?
Was the intent to protect vendors who said they did not want to jeopardize their businesses?
Will the fallout from this further erode public confidence in city hall's ability to be forthcoming?
Whatever the reason or reasons, this was not one of Burcham's finer moments.
Telling visitors that the market building was closed for a "fall cleanup" should have been the first tip-off that something more was amiss than just a few dust bunnies and some peeling paint.
Everyone knows that the market building is a dump, so the idea of any cleanup -- let alone a fall cleanup -- should have raised public suspicion.
Why not just tell the whole truth?
To anyone who has been inside the market building, news of critters keeping quarters there should not have come as a huge surprise.
Then why all of the ducking and diving, shucking and jiving about what is really going on with the market building?
Here's a news flash: There is no way to put a positive spin on rodents.
Rather than using their energy to spin the story, Burcham and staff should have told us what is going on and how it is going to be fixed.
That's what Superintendent Rita Bishop did with the school system when confronted with a similar scenario.
Only a month into the job, Bishop shuttered rat-infested Fairview Elementary School and began a full-scale eradication.
Her bold action came less than a week before 450 students were set to begin school after summer break. Bishop acted quickly to redirect Fairview youngsters to classroom trailers at another school.
And she didn't try to sugarcoat it.
"The first thing the parents need to know is that the priority of the superintendent and the school board is the safety of the students," Bishop said at the time.
That's what I'm talking about -- and so apparently is one of Burcham's bosses, Vice Mayor Sherman Lea.
"I just think that we need to be forthright on what we're doing and let people know about this," Lea told The Roanoke Times in response to questions about the market building.
"To say just cleaning, that's misleading," Lea added.
No, vice mayor, that's playing us for fools.
