ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 4, 1996 TAG: 9612040031
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
FOR RAISING questions about how Rocky Mount Town Council is running things, lifelong resident Anne Carter Lee Gravely is to be commended. Prying open windows to let in a few beams of sunshine can have a powerful cleansing effect on government at any level.
In calling for an investigation by state police, however, Gravely is overreaching. So far, anyway, questions about wrongdoing of the sort for which such probes are designed appear to have been answered.
Councilman Arnold Dillon, for example, apparently avoided potential conflict-of-interest pitfalls - as a legal matter anyway - in the town's hiring of his son and daughter-in-law. Dillon did not participate in a council vote to name his son to a job in the town's water department; his daughter-in-law was hired not by council but by Town Manager Mark Henne.
What's left are issues less of potential wrongdoing than of ineptitude. Apart from any legal considerations, even the town's lack of a clearly stated policy on nepotism could be regarded as a policy shortcoming.
Much of the ineptitude seems to be political ineptitude. The town attorney's making of a crude remark about Gravely while she was addressing council was, besides being apalling, not very smart politically. Not very smart, either, was council members' initial refusal to acknowledge the problem, even though the remark was recorded on a cassette tape used to take minutes of the meeting. (Council did end up reprimanding the attorney.)
More generally, why make enemies of the local revitalization group with which Gravely is a volunteer? A defter touch might have avoided open hostilities, or at least sought to minimize hostilities, with any group whose members vote in town elections. Besides which, the revitalization group has some good ideas for refurbishing the downtown, which an effective council would want to heed.
In a town like Rocky Mount, political conflict among local organizations - such as the revitalization group, the retail merchants association and council - is not uncommon. Nor is it uncommon to lament inadequacies of leadership, either in finding consensus or in energetically promoting a town's future.
Open windows, let in the sun, and the next thing you know someone is trying to sweep the place clean. And yet, absent reasonable cause for suspecting outright wrongdoing, this is still something for the voters of Rocky Mount, not the state police, to decide.
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