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COLUMBUS, Ga. — City Councilor Joanne Cogle (District 7) continued her steadfast ambition for the city to better-maintain the downtown area during the council meeting held on July 25.

The current conversation began two weeks prior on July 11 when Councilor Glenn Davis (District 2) pointed out how obviously-decrepit the state of the downtown area’s infrastructure has become. Through personal anecdote, Davis pointed out the lack of visible parking lines, negligent landscaping, low-hanging tree limbs, and visible trash strewn about. Several of Davis’ colleagues, including Cogle, backed Davis’ tactful comments.

In reply, City Manager Isaiah Hugley gave excuses as to why none of that was his fault and that there was effectively nothing he could do about it., despite him literally being the city manager.

Hugley mentioned that the city’s resources must be equally distributed throughout the entire city, which ironically exposed his incompetence and lack of integrity even more: By saying that, Hugley had inadvertently acknowledged that the entirety of the city he himself is personally responsible for maintaining is in fact not being maintained; if downtown is a mess, and resources must be equally distributed, then by Hugley’s own admission the rest of the city is a mess as well — which is ironically the end result of Hugley’s entire job.

That conversation didn’t only repeat itself during the July 25 meeting, but even further exposed Hugley’s clear lack of honest effort to bring solutions instead of excuses.

After stressing the obvious safety concerns of not having visibly-painted crosswalks and parking lines in the city’s most highly-traffic commercial area for the umpteenth time, Cogle went so far as to literally hand Hugley a list of local contractors who are willing and able to perform the necessary work that Hugley just said he couldn’t find the personnel for, along with a plan for how to fund the project — both of which, by the way, are part of Hugley’s job.

Immediately following the city manager’s agenda during the July 25 meeting, Cogle made the following statement to Hugley:

“I've had a couple weeks to digest our conversation about the striping in uptown since our last meeting and I understand that there is an order in which our striping individuals go about striping the city. So I took the liberty in the last two weeks to come up with two different striping companies that are available to provide that service for us. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's probably some TAD dollars that may be able to be used in that. I just want to bring it to the forefront that we're expanding Uptown … the High Side Market is opening at the end of August … I had a friend fly a drone up there and if you look at the overhead spot of that particular Crossing on 13th Street … the crosswalks there are almost not visible, and we're about to send people back and forth on those crosswalks. So it's a fairly large safety concern that I don't think can wait until we work on the 13th Street Corridor Project over the next couple years … I just think we owe it to our small businesses in uptown to at least clean up a little bit. So I will send those two striping businesses to you so that you can look at getting that done.”

Since Hugley wasn’t doing his job to manage the city, Cogle had no problem embarrassing him by holding his hand to help do it for him. 

Nonetheless, Hugley still continued to provide a slew of excuses for why he can’t seem to commit to getting the job done, despite that literally being his profession. Hugley continued to provide a plethora of reasons for why he can’t do what is required, coupled with an equal list of reasons for why that somehow isn’t his fault. 

One would think that a diligent, results-oriented professional like the city manager of the state’s second-largest city ought to help bring effective solutions to the table in the form of option on how to get the job done instead of being an immature contrarian who’s hell-bent on avoiding responsibility for the results of their own inaction — the latter of which is precisely what Hugley has observably-continued to do for no less than seven months.

Cogle has campaigned for better upkeep throughout the downtown area since before she was even sworn in as a councilor back in January. 

Despite her efforts and those of her colleagues, the city manager’s office has yet to implement a maintenance plan to fix the issues as the area remains in an ever-increasing state of decay.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

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