Apparently, the writers of our Metro Charter should have held off several decades and talked with Council Member
Greg Adkins before writing that the Metro Board of Health should exercise administrative functions pertaining to the regulation of privately owned institutions for the purpose of sanitation and public health. CM Adkins, who while filling in for Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors
broke the tie to move an anti-regulation bill on to second reading, obviously has a better grasp of how the Health Department should function than did the writers. After all, this is what he
just told the Tennessean tonight:
In this day and age of where we are with the economy, I don’t want to punish restaurants in any way, shape or form
Well, perhaps Metro should also stop doing those health inspections and scoring restaurants on hygiene and food storage. If regulation amounts to punishment, why ask the Board of Health to apply and enforce any rules?
Greg Adkins should have made a more presidential argument for his tie-breaker (which could eventually constitute a veto of Health Department rules, if this bill passes all three readings) than "regulation equals punishment."
Emily Evans and Megan Barry were suspiciously absent tonight. Were they afraid to vote on the water bill or the led bill?
ReplyDeleteEvans blogged recently that she was missing this meeting because of a family vacation:
ReplyDeletehttp://metrocouncildistrict23.blogspot.com/2009/03/water-sewer-and-stormwater-at-last-but.html
Go ahead and take up for her. if storm water was as important to all of us as it appeared to be to her, We would have scheduled the vactaion around the Council meeting.
ReplyDeleteI think she folded after Meagan Barry threw her under the bus last week in the Scene.
Ease up there, Cochise.
ReplyDeleteAll I did was clarify what she said about her absence.