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The Meeting that never was..........

Mayor's press conference on vouchers canceled because?

The Meeting that never was........

By Scott Clark
3-24-00

Mayor's press conference on vouchers canceled because?

City Hall, 10am. I came to City Hall today to see Mayor Brown, in a press conference regarding vouchers for the homeless. I came ready to throw verbal popcorn (not pies as of old, no relation): but instead, I found sunshine and a movie, usually disparate elements, perhaps the reason for the missing press conference. The movie was not being shown in a theater; it was being filmed on three sides of City Hall. The press conference was not on the Mayor's Friday schedule, but was probably being still worked out in the semi-darkness of the full day of departmental meetings he had scheduled instead.

Deciding to leave the movie crew to its development of artifice or mystery, I went inside the city building, trying to undevelop my own. By "my own" I mean the whereabouts of the conference. The outside production appeared too large to be handling that. Some moments of confusion and a couple of half trips up and down the first staircase brought me and Benny (the other PNN reporter sent with me on this excursion) to the conclusion to seek out the Mayor¹s Office of the Press, Rm.291.

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The Press Secretary, alone in her office, responded blankly to my inquiry about a press conference. I asked doesn't he usually have them on Fridays, and showed her the front page of the materials I had been given that announced it. She didn't really answer direct, just saying "There's nothing on today's schedule for a press conference, he only has departmental meetings all day." I feigned like I understood, with the movie outside, maybe it had been canceled for the sake of convenience, and said as much, thanked her as I was leaving.

The problem is, the mayor is going to have to deal with this issue publicly, no matter how much he may dislike sunshine on his meetings. The question of using vouchers to deal with a multidimensional issue such as homelessness really has already been fought and won in the defeat of Proposition E. The antipathy towards such measures being instituted via meetings which are not being recorded (as alluded to by the comment from Will Lightbourne, head of the Department of Human Services, when someone asked him for the minutes to these meetings, he replied, "Minutes? What minutes?") is at least as strong as the 59% NO vote on Proposition E. We are just standing around in the dark, watching a really engrossing movie, waiting for the first invading ray.

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