I am not a fan of government in most senses because I feel as though they are bloated and mostly incompetent institutions with roughly 4 times as many people working for them as they actually need. I don't feel as though they accomplish a great deal outside of maybe the fire department and city planning and city council offices are the worst offenders of this. I say this because the city council in most cities are simply popularity contests the likes of which we would nominate a king and queen for a high school homecoming dance. These folks in turn hire their friends to be the staff of the city and in the meantime no one has any real qualifications for the job at hand.
This is evidenced in this recent story about how a small town in Florida accidentally sold the city's sole water supply to someone accidentally.
Upon completing the purchase for a mere $55,000 (good score there Bobby!) he looked at the documents more closely only to discover that the city had actually sold him the parcel of land complete with a several hundred-foot tall water tower with thousands of gallons of water that the community depends on year round.
Legally speaking, this clerical error could have resulted in Read being a jerk and demanding that the city buy the tower back for much more than he paid for the property, but being a good guy, he immediately signed a document that gave the tower back to the small town.
By the way, the person in the second picture is Bobby Read, not the guy in the first one. I was trying to throw you for a loop and make you think that this first portly gentleman was going to open a fitness center and that would have made the story extra dumb.
This story isn't dumb, the government leaders are. This shows that not only are they incompetent, but they also simply don't pay attention to their jobs. The mayor said in an interview that "we're human, we make mistakes" and for me this is not a good enough excuse on the part of the mayor. If they could make an oversight like this, what other things are simply passing through the system unchecked? I would imagine quite a lot.
If anything good comes out of this I hope it heads in the way of Bobby Read and that he gets a lot of business because of the honest manner in which he handled this mistake because it wasn't his own, that's for sure. One does kind of question the competence of the various brokers and lawyers involved though, because this isn't a transaction like buying a soda pop and a candy bar from a minimart. Someone should have noticed but they didn't because they don't care.
The city council of Brooksville fired the city manager after this debacle and funnily enough, they voted to appoint the manager of the Fire Department to fill the position. Maybe things will be different from this point forward. For now, Brooksville is on the lips of everyone in Florida presently and for all the wrong reasons. Imagine if you will, how much of this takes place all across the United States on a daily basis.
