Hazlehurst's Blog

This afternoon at 3 p.m. city council will meet for a closed-door personnel session to evaluate the performance of city manager Penny Culbreth-Graft.

There’s nothing extraordinary about the session. It’s one of series of such meetings, held annually to assess the performance of the five council appointees: the city manager, the city attorney, the city clerk, the utilities director and the city auditor.

How does the majority of council feel about Culbreth-Graft’s performance? Will council members give her high marks for dealing with the city’s ongoing financial crisis, or do they believe that she’s been ineffective, even incompetent?

In past years, city council has been notably reluctant to get rid of appointees. Just as senior city officials often remain in their jobs for decades, council appointees usually stay in their posts until retirement beckons.

And, according to the usual unreliable sources, the Wall Street Journal is sending a reporter to town this week to cover our travails.

It’ll be interesting to see the eventual story.

Will the WSJ spin it as did the Denver Post, a city turning out the lights through the folly of skinflint voters? Or will it be a story of a proudly conservative city, challenging lib’rul orthodoxy, and creating a new template for municipal governance? Or will they just see it as a nothingburger piece-just another broke municipality, and so what?

Who knows? In any case, it’ll give us the kind of pub that you can’t buy … and if you could, you wouldn’t want!

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