Dear TNCP,
Lansing voters are lining up in droves to sign our recall petitions for a myriad of reasons.
Golfers and green space advocates are up in arms over his attempts not to open, to sell and now to decommission two golf courses.
Petition signers abhor his arrogance, find his demeanor and use of profanity disgusting many distrust him completely.
Others can’t believe that he’s broken with the city’s tradition and long standing policy of hiring only Lansing residents as mayoral staff and department heads. Lansing residents are fed up.
Sincerely,
Charlene Decker
Lansing, MI
Rina,
Just a short note to say that I saw you and your family on City Council TV this weekend, speaking before the city council last Monday (October 2) in an attempt to seek some justice and respect for the Poetry in the Park series.
Although I never had the opportunity to attend one last summer (what with me being in Detroit during the week), I wanted to say that I have certainly heard many good comments about the series–the old axium that "great poetry needs great audiences" being put into good effect. I was sorry to hear, however, that you’d gotten such bureaucratic runaround from the city, but it has ever been so. Even modest arts organizations and events are made by city agencies to jump through increasingly more complex administrative hoops to receive increasingly smaller funding.
And tho I never approached the city for funding events like Burning Desires in order to avoid such frustration and limitation, I certainly wish you well in your further endeavors with them. If there’s something I can do to help, let me know; I may only be here on the weekends, but I can still crawl up on the barricades and hurl rhyming couplets until they surrender…
best of luck,
Sam Mills
Lansing, MI
Sam,
Thank you. We got our funds on Wednesday morning for the Writers Block. The funding that was put into the budget by City Council was not enough to cover the expenses of the entire event (Poetry in the Park).
Any program that promotes poetry is an awesome program and you just have to stand up and be counted. I still want to know why the Poetry in the Park program was "scrapped". There is something not right about it. We even agreed to fund the program and they turned us down.
It is so great when you are fighting for others rights to have poetry programs. It is not expensive to buy paper and pens.
I hope that you are going to resume as the Burning Desires coordinator.
Sincerely,
Rina N. Risper