Letters: Homeless camp evictions just another way 'shameless' Columbus fails needy
City Hall's 'facade' fails homeless
The problem with the populist narrative City Hall peddles about helping the vulnerable is that said narrative is exposed as a facade at nearly every turn.
Still, it’s difficult not to admire the City’s semantic acrobatics.
More:Franklin County homeless shelter population up, challenged by lack of affordable housing
Let’s take the case of Emerald Hernandez-Parra, described in Eric Legatta’s Aug. 8 article, "Homeless camp given deadline to leave," about the recent eviction served to FIRST Collective’s Camp Shameless.
In it, he describes her position with the mayor’s office as its “homeless advocacy liaison.”
Given that she’s the architect of the evictions of homeless camps across the city and the first person to discourage citizen-led efforts in place of failing programs the City champions, her position title should probably be changed to something akin to ”re-housing discouragement.”
More:City clears out homeless camp on Far South Side as activists protest sweep
The fact is that the city has consistently fallen short of addressing issues of poverty, houselessness, addiction, and mental health — all of which are integral to each other — and has created public relations positions to put undue pressure on the unhoused while presenting themselves to the public as enforcers of a just and equitable society.
In the meantime, they send their operatives into the community to halt effective measures as they continue to fail our most vulnerable.
David Harewood, Columbus
Concealment the name of the game in Columbus City Hall
Vladimir Kogan’s Aug. 2 dispatch.com column "'Eyebrow-raising' proposed charter changes could chuck objectivity in city hiring", says that in pushing for Columbus City Charter changes making it easier to hire and promote city employees based on politics instead of competence, city officials have misrepresented the current hiring practice and are presenting their proposals in manner "incomplete at best and disingenuous at worst.”
Their behavior continues repeated problems of concealment in the Columbus city government.
Regarding the city hiding for two years its plans to demolish a Route 315 exit ramp to benefit OhioHealth, a Dispatch editorial said in 2018: “Many aspects of this purposeful deception are troubling, not least of which is that it raises questions of what else city administrators . . . might be keeping from us.”
More:Public kept in the dark for 2 years about plans to demolish Rt. 315 ramp
In criticizing city officials’ lack of openness in arranging to pay Nationwide $65 million to refinance a loan concerning Nationwide Arena, a Dispatch editorial said in 2020: “Doing the public’s business behind closed doors . . . is never the preferred path to success.”
More:Editorial: Arena loan repayment deal should have been discussed more openly
Last year a Theodore Decker column scolded city officials for secretly resisting for years – at the behest of AEP –implementation of an energy-aggregation program that would have lowered utility bills. Decker said this was another instance of city business being conducted “not in council chambers but in conference calls and corporate boardrooms.”
Thomas Jefferson said, "The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.” In a city of over 900,000 people, voters should be able to find some Jeffersonian candidates to elect to city offices.
Joseph Sommer, Columbus
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Letters: Shameful city officials evicting Shameless homeless camp
