By SCOTT SMITH and KEN de la BASTIDE
Tribune columnists
July 19, 2008 11:45 pm
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Council free-for-all
The Kokomo Common Council’s public hearing Wednesday on two proposed annexation ordinances was held in front of a packed room at City Hall, with a television providing a closed-circuit broadcast of the meeting for an overflow crowd in the lobby.
Inside the meeting, the audience was boisterous; cheering, booing, people blurting things out, etc. Council president Mike Kennedy made no effort to call for decorum, saying later he didn’t think it would have made much of a difference.
One of the evening’s lowlights came when county resident Eric Barko came to the microphone to address Kennedy.
Barko demanded an apology, saying Kennedy had wrongfully accused him of making a threatening statement a few weeks ago.
“I have three witnesses who say I didn’t do that,” Barko said.
“You told me I wouldn’t make it to this meeting, and I asked you to step into the police department with me to repeat what you’d just said,” Kennedy fired back.
Barko then said Kennedy had misunderstood him, and hadn’t allowed him to finish what he was going to say.
Kennedy declined to apologize to Barko.
McKillip still on city insurance
As made evident by recent statements in the local media, former Kokomo Mayor Matt McKillip hasn’t lost his interest in local politics.
One of his biggest concerns seems to be the fact four city council members and council attorney Corbin King continue to be on the city’s insurance plan, despite the fact they aren’t full-time city employees.
McKillip’s comments, however, led others to note that McKillip and his family are also on the city insurance plan, seven months after McKillip left office.
McKillip has continued his coverage under the federal Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA) law, which lets employees who are terminated, laid off, etc., stay on their former employer’s insurance.
COBRA is expensive, as anyone who has been forced onto COBRA knows. City officials confirmed McKillip is current on his payments of the $1,694 monthly COBRA premium.
The former mayor couldn’t be reached for comment Friday, but his profile on the business networking site LinkedIn.com says he is currently the CEO of CMS-Katra, and an executive director of Katra Healthcare USA at Katra Group.
Two relevant points
To those following the annexation story, The Public Eye would like to stress that apart from the emotions the issue elicits, there have also been some relevant points made.
One of the most relevant, which needs to be examined at length, concerns Harrison Township Fire Protection.
The Harrison Township issue is a touchy subject, made worse by an apparent rivalry between the Harrison firefighters and the city firefighters. Before Wednesday’s hearing, the wife of one of the Harrison firefighters told the Public Eye the Kokomo guys had taken a dig at the volunteers in the paper.
“They said they were ‘professionals.’ That’s a dig,” she insisted.
Words, we all know, are tricky. One person might take the word professional to simply mean “paid.” Others might take it as an assertion of superiority.
Nevertheless, if the city annexes 51 percent of Harrison Township, township trustee John Harbaugh will have a tough decision to make.
Would it then be worth maintaining a separate volunteer department to protect the 49 percent of the township not covered by the Kokomo Fire Department?
Or would it be wiser to sell the volunteer department’s assets to the city, and be repaid with free city fire protection — for the entire township — for a 10-year period?
“I’ll do whatever’s best for the people of Harrison Township,” is all Harbaugh has committed to say thus far.
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