Publisher’s note: The following opinion article was submitted to NIT by James Sayles after it was allegedly censored by the Globe Gazette.
Mason City lost a pioneer this past Tuesday. He was the last survivor of the original cast of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man”. For over a century, Professor Hill, an epic con-man and charlatan, has been the poster-child for fleecing, conning and deceiving the citizens of Mason City.
Hill was dethroned as Mason City’s most destructive malefactor of all time, by the tag team of Aaron Burnett and Mike Kohan. Hill was laid out for public viewing on a sheet of ice to nowhere in a $15 Million arena paid for by you.
Professor Hill is survived by no one and his memory will be stricken from history by the atrocity that is River City Renaissance. The unfortunate and inconvenient truth is that the process, if not the projects have been, since day one, undertaken through subterfuge and fraud.
Our community has been the victim of a coup d’état, artfully masterminded by autocrat Aaron Burnett with collaboration and support of the City Council, Mayor and hired-help. There are those that say Burnett has not been here long enough to be the one responsible. He is responsible because he demanded to be in charge and took any and all measures to take command of the RMS Titanic-Renaissance.
The subjugation, hijack and trampling of your constitutional rights to an open, transparent and honest government have been full-throttle since the arrival of Burnett in 2018. The sole factor for which he was hired was his promise, with no excuses, to deliver the Ice Arena for Mason City Youth Hockey, on their timeline, at any cost.
This is where you come in. Those costs have been progressively transferred to your shoulders by an ever-increasing level of risk associated with all principal players of RCR. Once the entire burden of this project shifts, and it will shift to the taxpayers, we will never be able to escape that burden. Atlas cannot shrug.
My friends, at the 15 January council meeting, we were witnesses to the most amazing feat of ventriloquism since Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. It was an extravaganza to behold. The ventriloquists’ dummy with the wood-block head was a ringer for Mayor Schickel. True to form, the voices changed, the message stayed the same, and the ventriloquist’s lips only moved sometimes on the few occasions where Vote Yes partisans appeared out of nowhere.
If the ventriloquist show was not enough, the vaudevillians and magicians at the dais and behind the desk gave us a slight of hand and magic show for the ages.
Messrs. Thoma and Jaszewski tried to sound like Millennials. Mr. Lee tried to do mental math. The Mayor and Mr. Burnett were performing “Abbott and Costello’s; Who’s on First?”
Messrs. Adams and Symonds, who were tapped for the Houdini Act, exhibited some conscience through relevant questions, and would have done the right thing, I think, if they could have found an escape hatch to their previous year’s voting history.
Bravo Mr. Masson! You have provided a little daylight for our citizens experiencing the dark, cold of winter. I dare say your recent votes and statements could nearly be considered rebellion based on the normal lock-steps and terminal laryngitis of the council.
The showstopper and Tuesdays’ most perfidious act of the evening was Mr. Burnett’s public incompetence. Repeatedly defending the serial-real estate tax evader, Mike Kohan as an acceptable partner.
Citizens called him out on the seriousness of the inadequacy of fail-safes structured within the 40-year-long contract. Mr. Burnett’s Rope-a-Dope in the 15th round was more Dope than Rope.
Nowhere within the agreement brokered by Burnett and poorly written by our high-priced lawyers in Des Moines, are the interests of the Mason City Community protected. You were hung out to dry and where the rubber meets the road, for the purpose of providing a resume line item for Aaron Burnett. In three years, he has had three jobs increasing in salary from $50K to $175K.
You’ve watched it all happen….
