McNiel offers advice

It appears that a number of citizens of Pea Ridge have finally become fed up with the way this city has been operated. There is now someone opposing every single available open seat on the City Council.

Now then, before anyone gets the wrong impression from this letter, I want to say first of all, that on the surface, the city of Pea Ridge appears to be a welloiled, well-run city. I also want to point out that if some of the people who are opposing the current council members actually win, they will not necessarily make any changes to the better. The new people could in fact, actually make things worse. We have no more control over these new people once they have been voted in then (sic) we have over the current officials.

I would like to suggest a few things I believe should be addressed:

1. There should be accountability: This means that when anyone goes into City Hall and asks to speak to any person who works for the city, someone should be able to tell you where they are or when they will be available.

3. I would like to have an audit done to uncover how many separate days the Mayor and or City Staff made out-of-town excursions to Little Rock and other various places for so-called training. I would like to have an accounting of how much money the city paid out for all of these expenses and also have a detailed accounting of what these people learned that was beneficial for the citizens of Pea Ridge.

4. There should be a clip board set up at the City Hall window where the citizens can write down their concerns and suggestions addressed each week.

5. Council members and mayors should only get pay raises when the people on Social Security get pay raises.

6. Police Officers should not be permitted to drive any police vehicles outside of the city limits to their homes when off duty. Who do you suppose is paying for their gas?

7. Sidewalks should only be built on one side of the road.

8. All city meetings should be published verbatim; recording every single word that each politician says.

9. When the Circuit Judge does not start city court when the ticket says to be in court, then everyone’s ticket should be dismissed.

10. The City Council should revoke any businesses (sic) license until the business takes out all (job killing) self-checkout booths and they swear to hire enough people to run the cash registers so that none of the paying customers have to stand in line for more than 30 seconds. Or they should stipulate that the business is required to reduce each customer’s bill by $1 for every full minute that the customer is forced to stand in line when the business (sic) do not hire enough people to run the cash registers. BOYD B. MCNIEL Pea Ridge, Ark.