Apology to Mrs. Raines

What a meeting tonight. I will post quite a bit in the morning, but I wanted to first apologize to Mrs. Charles Raines.

I was informed tonight that something said on this board offended the Raines' family. I would ask you all to keep the replies fact oriented and not dip into name calling. I think that thus far we have only had a couple of questionable responses and I would be happy to remove them from the board to alleviate any further aggravation.

Mrs. Raines, despite your comments to me this evening, I did not make the post to which you were referring. As I told you tonight, I do disagree with many decisions that your husband has made in the BOMA, but that comes with the territory. I am sure that everyone in this city disagrees with something done by each of the Aldermen.

You are welcome to contact me at any time through email and I would be happy to meet with you to discuss anything that you would like. There are many people that post on this site, and I would like for everyone to be free to submit opinions as necessary.

Also, for those of you that have seen us out petitioning, and beginning to get this community involved and interested, the "Gorilla in the Corner" is not one person. This is a metaphor for our elected officials to begin taking into account the true problems at hand. The greatest of which being the apportionment of wards.

Thank you for reading this Mr. and Mrs. Raines. I appreciate your service to the city and I hope that we can begin seeing things through a similar point of view. In the end I think that we are all after the same thing, community involvement! I would also love to talk about this over dinner if you are interested. It is on me.