MASON CITY – The Mason City Human Rights Commission and Department met for their monthly meeting Thursday and discussed looming budget cuts to its operation.
The commission was set to offer a cut of $20,000 to the council at a work session the council was to hold later that evening in the same room. They would find out later that a cut six times larger would be imposed by the council. Council member Alex Kuhn was in attendance. He would advocate for the smallest cut to the agency later that evening, but his proposal would still have been a massive cut.
The commission also struggled with how to communicate reports and financial data to the council and Mayor Eric Bookmeyer. There was disagreement within the commission on whether it had met the council’s demands for information. It has been said that Bookmeyer ordered a financial audit of the Human Rights Department all the way back to 1972 and it was completed months ago.
The following video contains highlights from the Human Rights meeting. In the video, Director Lionel Foster describes how a massive cut to the department will effectively cripple the commission moving forward.
httpv://youtu.be/csZAUTMdJgc
All human rights do is eat and snoop
They asked for our vote to represent us on the City Council. At no time did they campaign on the need to reduce the budget by a couple hundred thousand at an expense of loosing a whole department devoted to assisting landlords/tenants business and employees alike. The city has the money to pay for this, this is clearly an attack on them and is masqueraded as a budget issue. Watch as this next year starts and how many times they go into reserves to pay for some project.
Get ready people they get away with this and what else will they get away with? tornquist and bookmeyer have tried for years to get rid of the HR doing it by cutting the budges is a back door move that everyone sees through. When these two talked about remodeling city hall and blue zone never once did they talk about having to cut the budget 292,000!!
Our leaders should be proud that we have such a great HR Commission that has serviced so many people for so many years. They should be doing everything in their power to keep this gold star in our city’s crown by finding alternative ways to finance it. Marion pays CR to handle its cases. Why can’t MC dun Clear Lake, CG County, and surrounding areas for handling cases for them? Have our fearless leaders even investigated this? I’m betting NO because they truly do want to wash their hands of this Commission and Mr. Foster. Had they mentioned even ONE effort to try to raise other funds, I might believe they want to save this service, but I have not heard one thing about rescusing it with other financing. I’m now convinced they just want it gone for very unfair reasons other than financing. Their plans are transparent They should all be ashamed of themselves.
Well said Pete! – time to vote these big business owned city leaders out !
What has to be realized here is the failure to vote. If enough people voted to match the way they think, this would have never happened, not in a million years.
This city excels in out of control leadership abetted by a pitiful council. We have a incompetent mayor who is a profound embarrassment to this community and a coward for an administtrator….who worries about his job.
Where is the compassion for the poor, the unfortunate amomg us who need help. e can give the museum $265,000.00 a year, spend 70K on moving a desk, 40K to buy statuary…and Turnquist can’t sleep at night because he’s worried about the money? What a sorry excuse for a human being he is.
@Peter Children-very well said.
Peter, I miss your regular commentary on here.
An audit back to 1972? Boy, he really doesn’t want them to have time to do their real jobs, does he. If this is true, that is just outrageous. Who did the audit? Did they pay a CPA to do it? What possible relevance could an audit going back that far have? Now I’m really suspicious of the motives behind this. This whole thing stinks big time. They have done NOTHING to try to save it. Not one productive thing.
yep..cut Human Rights ..and leave those damn statues downtown…wow is Mason City in bad shape.
They just didn’t seem to understand the severity of their problem.
Human Rights Commission never had a problem.
This was all Mayor Bookmeyers vendetta.
While Bookmeyere accomplished his mission, it is not in the best interests of Mason City, Iowa!!!!!!!!!