To the Editor:

Wake up Selma! Our town is dying and the gold is being swiped out of our teeth while we lay in the morgue! Day after day we watch this administration rob us blind by misusing the hard earned money we give them to run this city. Day after day they tell us that they are looking out for us and yet they go ahead and squander the money we give them. Day after day we say the mayor is “one of us, grew up right here in East Selma and he has done good,”but what good has he done any of us? Month after month we listen to city council squabble, point fingers and get nothing done. How many times have YOU yourself told one of your babies that you couldn’t afford to take them to McDonald’s, yet some of these people are making $14,500 a year to do nothing and yet they get several free trips all over this country averaging over $2’000 a trip!

Wake up Selma! How many of you had to decide to whether to pay your water bill or buy your kid a new toy? Between just the Mayor and the council members that serve on the water board, over $79,000 is spent in their pay to meet a couple of times a month if that much! I am sure this is well spent money considering the horrible condition the sewer system in old town alone is. When we get a good rain, you need a john boat to make it up the street. However, if that is not enough to convince you that they are robbing us blind, consider this… You would have to pay your water bill every month for 183 YEARS to pay the water board salary for what these four people earn in just one year.

Wake up, Selma! The mayor tells us crime is down, yet it takes over 45 minutes for an officer to respond to a Girl Scout troop fending off a man who was exposing himself! Try and file a report about a couple of teenagers aiming rifles at your house with your babies inside. It takes 52 minutes for a patrol car to show up, and after you point out the guys you are told since they are minors that nothing can be done. What about when someone fires several shots into your house and when the police finally do show up and you tell them who did it, they tell you too bad because you have to have their date of birth and Social Security number! Wake up Selma, the only reason crime is “down” is because the police have their hands tied and are failing to fill out the proper reports! The patrolmen want to do their jobs, but because of this administration they can’t.

Wake up Selma and let’s figure out a solution. How about the Mayor and those council members serving on the water board on take what is truly reasonable to serve. We can take that money and add it to the money for these trips the council likes to take. With all of that we could not only hire more officers to help fight crime, but even employ enough officers to staff a juvenile holding place so that crimes committed by our youth are not ignored. I for one would rather pick my kid up at the police station for petty mischief than to pick him up in the morgue because he thought he could get away with something worse and get killed, because nothing has been done to address juvenile crime.

Wake up Selma, just because we are offered a pretty new high school, doesn’t mean we have to be stupid enough to believe that this will get us jobs, keep us safe, make this a “family friendly” town or help our city grow. They only thing that will do all of that and STILL get us a new high school, is someone else in the driver seat of Selma!

Maggie Davies