If the first week of this new year is representative of the weeks to come, then not much appears to have changed in Columbus and the surrounding area.
Violent crime continues to plague the city, government officials are running amuck without smelling their own cooking, and incompetence continues to serve as an intricate part of our region’s future development and planning.
NEW YEAR’S SHOOTINGS
The cities of Columbus, Ga. and Phenix City, Ala. both suffered from a spree of violent shootings that ushered in the new year. During the holiday weekend from December 30, 2022 to January 1, 2023, the cities suffered four shootings that left at least four people wounded.
The violent shootings came after the Christmas Weekend shootings, which left an additional three people dead and another one person wounded just one week before.
Though the Fountain City may be ringing in a new year, violent crime continues to rise throughout the Columbus area at rates far outpacing other cities throughout the southeast region and the nation as a whole.
With a population of roughly 205,000 people, the city experienced an unprecedented 70 homicides in 2021 at a rate of more than 34 per hundred-thousand residents. That rate was more than five times the national average that same year.
While homicides themselves decreased in 2022, the number of shooting incidents as a whole staggeringly increased. Columbus suffered roughly 200 shooting incidents in 2022. Roughly one out every thousand residents have literally taken a bullet over the past year in 2022.
INVITE-ONLY SPECIAL INTERESTS
Columbus officials will be meeting with a select group of invite-only business owners to discuss their individual special interests during a planned ‘bus tour’ through Columbus, though no open-call or notice was provided to the public for non-favored businesses to apply to participate.
The ‘bus tour’ was first brazenly discussed during the city council meeting held on December 6, 2022. Several high-rolling businesses and owners were mentioned by-name — Gamache, Woodruff, and Halter, to name a few — as city officials lauded over the opportunity to provide them with favoritism and preferential treatment not afforded to the general public.
No public notice, open call, nor forum was provided to the public to afford the same opportunity to other businesses who aren’t as top-of-mind or as favored by city officials. Only the select few who were hand-picked by the city government are eligible to have their special interests served.
It is unclear why this favored group of businesses and owners cannot simply request to speak during a city council meeting to redress their grievances, or to simply send an email to their elected officials like everyone else is required to.
This is not the first time in recent months that the Columbus city council has brazenly discussed how they plan to serve the special interests of high-rolling residents.
FLAWED SURVEY FOR CITY PLANNING
The survey and its data collection methods contain serious design flaws, making it only capable of producing heavily skewed and largely misleading results. City officials will use those inherently skewed results to make decisions on how to plan the city’s future.
The “Visioning Survey” is intended to help the city guide its development of its new “Fast Forward Phenix City” project: a self-proclaimed “updated city-wide plan” for comprehensive future development efforts.
The key problem is that the survey is being distributed through the city’s “Positively Phenix City” Facebook page. For users to even be served the opportunity to participate in the survey, they must by default already be a follower of that page — which means they have already opted-in to support the city’s “economic development” efforts.
This presents what is known as sample bias, which will inevitably skew the survey’s results to favor the city’s development efforts. Other biases within the survey are also of concern, such as the response bias created through social desirability and the non-response bias visible through the survey’s participation rate.
In short: the city has created a mechanism that is only mathematically capable of telling them they are doing a good job, whether they actually are or not — and officials will be using that “data” to make decisions on how to plan the city’s future. How positively wonderful.
THE WEEK AHEAD
The Columbus city council met on Tuesday of this past week for their first session of the year. After the annual heart-felt formalities were out of the way, heavy topics caused some heated conversations. The meeting raised a plethora of questions about government transparency, spending, and the nature of public/private partnerships, which appears to set the tone for what Columbus residents can expect from their government in the year to come.
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Ask the hard questions. Fix the hard answers. Rake the muck.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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