A message from Reliable Sources

Carnegie Election on June 5th

It's a better deal than the Dollar Store just around the corner. Pay a dollar for a membership to Carnegie Centre and you can come to the general meeting on June 5th to vote for a new Board of Directors. But hurry up. You need to have had a membership card for two weeks to be eligible to vote.

If you want to run for the Board you need to have had a membership card for 60 days.

To register to vote, you have to be at the theatre on the first floor of Carnegie at 5 p.m. If you come late, you won't be allowed to vote. The actual meeting starts at 5:30 p.m.

After you register, you can run upstairs to the cafeteria and get a seafood dinner for three dollars. They serve seafood every Thursday. Or you can get a bowl of soup for 75 cents.

Free coffee is provided at the meeting.

Rachel Davis -- many Carnegie members know her as Rosetta from the music program -- was new on the Board this past year and wrote about it: The Year I Spent a Decade on the Carnegie Board. Lou Anne, a Carnegie member who has overcome a brain injury, praised Rachel at a Board meeting a couple of months ago and said we need more "new blood" on the Board. Some people have spent too many years on the Board, Lou Anne pointed out.

You have to wonder if it is time to vote Jeff Sommers off the island. He spoke against a motion by Davis to hold a review of the barring of Simpson, a duly elected Board member, from the building and Board meetings. The fact that Downtown Eastsiders, whose interests Sommers claims to represent, had voted for Simpson and were being denied representation while he was relegated to the sidewalk outside during meetings, didn't seem to phase Sommers. He argued that if Simpson's barring was reviewed, everybody who was upset about being barred would want their case reviewed.

But Sommers will probably get re-elected. At this very moment, he may be burning up cell phone minutes rounding up people to come out and vote. And Jean Swanson -- that would be the homeless advocate who didn't speak up when a homeless Board member was denied entry to Board meetings -- will no doubt be using her e-mail list of reliable comrades to get the vote out for Sommers and others who avoided speaking up for the right of an elected Board member to come to meetings.

http://downtowneastsideenquirer.blogspot.com/2008/05/carnegie-election-on-june-5th.html

The lady who recovered from the brain injury is light-years ahead of the crew running the Carnegie Center at this time. There's little chance that such a mafia as they will relinquish power without a police raid, but there's a chance to try to at least put some rational and decent people on the board of directors there, if only to have them thrown onto the street like William Simpson had done to him by the City Hall functionaries at the behest of Ethanol, the Carnegie's grand apparatchick. One must try.