COLUMBIA CITY COUNCIL GOES ON TWO-DAY, $3,000 ‘TEAM-BUILDING RETREAT’

What’s the best thing to do when a city is literally falling to pieces because of the unfathomably poor management skills of its elected officials and bureaucratic “leadership”? Why, spends thousands of dollars to go on a “team-building retreat,” of course.

Columbia City Council members kicked off their two-day retreat Friday with a nearly $3,000 leadership seminar focused on team-building.

With the city reserves depleted by $39 million over the past seven years, and a projected $4.3 million shortfall in this year’s budget, council members felt that they needed some team-building before tackling the 2009-10 budget.

“We have mismanaged and we have overspent, and that’s exactly why we needed something like this,” Councilwoman Tameika Isaac Devine said. “I don’t think that’s a lot of money for a retreat of this magnitude.” [The State]

So, let me get this straight. Devine realizes that the entire council has completely run the city into the ground by mismanaging and overspending (her words) and she thought the solution was to spend even more money so that she and her pals could have a couple of play days?

I’ve got an even better “teambuilding” idea. How about all 125,000 residents of the City of Columbia go on a little “retreat” to the polls next April and again in 2012 and vote every single one of these morons out of office.

Of course, maybe I’m being a bit hasty, because it sounds like they did make some small attempt at being frugal with our money.

The city paid for lunch, which was about $8.50 per person, but Councilwoman Belinda Gergel brought in homemade pimento cheese sandwiches and a cake baked by her sister.

“I ate Belinda’s food,” Mayor Bob Coble said. “I also had two Life Savers, but I paid for them.”

Well, Rome is burning while the entire city council is off playing “duck, duck, goose” for two days, but as long as Bob paid for his own lifesavers, everything will be fine.

Plus, bearded councilman and multimillionaire Kirkman Finlay nobly cut his own salary by $2,000 last week, which almost pays for the entire field trip.

My question is, how much would it have cost to pay the bus driver to leave them there?