Tuesday night, Monroe Mayor Oliver Ellis made a great speech to a non-responsive crowd of Southside residents explaining his opposition to the “Southside Dream’s” tax component.
The mayor said he was concerned about poor people in South Monroe who stood in long lines at the CAP agency trying to get help to make ends meet.
He questioned the accountability of the Southside Economic District’s leadership, and said SEDD has received $750,000 in funding since 2018 and has not helped a single person. Therefore, he said, he has chosen to promote projects in the Southside and sidestep the SEDD in favor of Southside Council members.
It is refreshing to know that the mayor is concerned about the city’s poor. Perhaps we could make a few suggestions.
Since he mentioned the long lines of people at the CAP agency looking for help, wouldn’t it be nice if his administration granted a half million dollars a year to CAP to help pay the water and sewer bills he allows to increase automatically each year.
Every May the city routinely increases water and sewer rates, without a council vote, a practice approved by the Mayo Administration which candidate Ellis pledged to undo.
The elimination of that fee would save poor families hundreds of dollars each year.
The mayor could keep his promise to stop hiring garbage workers as temporary workers without benefits. Candidate Ellis pledged to undo that practice of the Mayo administration and on his first day in office put 19 of the workers on the regular payroll with benefits. However, in the months that have passed Candidate Friday Ellis became politician Oliver Ellis and resumed the Mayo practice hiring garbage workers without benefits.
The mayor erroneously threw out a figure of $750,000 that SEDD has received since 2018, which is about half true. He said SEDD has had no projects. He failed to tell the public at the meeting that he opposed SEDD’s first project to begin a loan guarantee and bond fund to help small minority and women-owned businesses get started. SEDD also wants to use its resources to provide bonds for black primary contractors to bid on big jobs.
The mayor twisted black council members’ arms and they voted, at the mayor’s request, not to allow SEDD to guarantee loans for blacks, women, and the disabled, which would include the beginnings of a bond fund for primary contractors.
The action would have put to use most of the $302,000 SEDD has on hand.
Two weeks later the mayor made a $2.5 million sweetheart deal with his politician friend Micheal Echols to help him build a hotel downtown. Ironically, he used public money to help a millionaire make more millions with public funds.
The mayor could take some steps toward approaching Southside’s crime problem. The city spends hundreds of thousands on studies and plans to enhance downtown, but has not commissioned a single study to find a solution to its most devastating problem, growing crime in Monroe’s Southside. The Southside Dream contains components that will require millions for preventive actions to reduce crime, expenditures the mayor opposes in the SEDD plan and has no plans to do them through the city’s budget.
The Southside Dream contains 47 projects that will require a huge redirection of priorities from the city of Monroe.
It also requires the mayor to believe that South Monroe is worth the effort.
Mayor Ellis is proving to be just another politician, who makes good talk about helping the poor, but when the rubber hits the road, can’t match his rhetoric with action.
His opposition is doing one thing for us..it’s firing up a voting base that will not sit down like it did in 2020.
Ellis’ opposition to the Southside Dream has given Southside residents something to fight for and if he persists, someone to vote against as the sleeping black voter population awakens, angry and motivated in 2024.
