CARLTON FLETCHER: Officials headed where ‘Pied Piper’ leads

Who’s zooming who?

— Aretha Franklin

You hear rumors around here. There are always rumors.

This is not a rumor.

A spanking new business in town is putting the finishing touches on its facilities as I write this. Officials with the company’s corporate offices have arrived to go through the hiring/training process, the point where businesses begin the final countdown to opening up shop. But that step has been delayed here.

The reason?

Not enough would-be employees have signed up to fill available positions. The opening of the business will be delayed while officials seek more applicants for the job openings.

And that, local government officials, kind of takes the wind out of that tired sail you’ve been putting up about people in this region clamoring for jobs. Now unless those people who have been “beating up” local officials about jobs are sitting back and waiting for those $100,000 per annum executive-type positions, it seems there has developed quite a disconnect between the public and the officials they’ve elected to represent them.

We’ve got officials who are voting to withhold funding from agencies because they say they’re doing nothing to bring jobs to “their constituents.” And yet, when job openings are announced and those constituents don’t apply, you can’t help but wonder who’s zooming who here.

We have officials, it seems, who would rather listen to a Pied Piper tell them that the way to fix this community’s ills is to guarantee, to set aside, if you will, funding for minority contractors because a large percentage of the population is minority. Never mind that what this Pied Piper is asking for is illegal, banned by the federal government. Our officials should waste their time and taxpayer money trying to devise a way to circumvent federal law.

The sad thing is that these officials, rather than maybe questioning the “facts” that this Pied Piper throws out, simply accept what he says and use his words to justify action that in no way implies true leadership.

Everybody wants to make it about race. I hate that. I hate to even mention that quality while writing this. But when said Pied Piper tells elected officials that past disparity studies that showed no signs of discrimination cannot be accurate because “there were nothing but white people doing the study,” and elected officials don’t question that reasoning, I’m left with nowhere else to go.

Maybe there are officials here who do feel that having a race-based majority gives them carte blanche to make decisions based on non-verified information just because it’s made by someone who looks like they do. I never would have thought that in the past, but at some point you can’t help but wonder.

And maybe they justify this position with the old standby that “that’s what whites did to us for so long.”

But the question remains: Are you willing to take down an entire community, to kill its momentum and discredit its plenteous assets over something that, in 2016, should not be a consideration?

Because, officials, there are jobs out there, jobs that need to be filled. And those people in your districts who you say have been clamoring for jobs … well, they are just as welcome as anyone else to apply. Which leads many to wonder how “desperate” these supposed job-seekers are.

Perhaps the disconnect here is that the people who truly want and need jobs are not getting the word that jobs are available. Which would, logically, lead one to think that officials would be working to come up with a plan, a program, that would put job-seekers in touch with job-providers. That’s a program deserving of officials’ time and taxpayers’ money.

But it seems that our officials would rather listen to a Pied Piper whose arguments harken back a good 40 to 50 years ago and whose “facts” on which those arguments are based are never even questioned. When the question is how many wrongs does it take to make a right, there just doesn’t seem to be a suitable answer.

I listened to a businessman I greatly respect discuss the reasoning of local officials as they’ve dug their heels in the sand and determined they will stand by ill-conceived decisions, no matter how seemingly wrong, simply because they can. This gentleman, who happens to be African-American, said, “They’re going to waste the power of their majority on that?”

It’s a question I can’t answer.