My Festivus Letter to Dayton City Commissioners

By Archie Magee, candidate for Dayton mayor, brought to you by Friends of Gem City Dudeist Priest Archie Magee.


Author's Note: This post is about the agenda that has come out for today's city commission meeting on 12/18/24 at 6PM at Dayton City Hall. Commission meetings take place at:

  • 6:00 p.m. on the first, third, and fifth Wednesday of the month, and
  • 8:30 a.m. on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month.

Happy Festivus, Commissioners,

In the spirit of my favorite holiday, Festivus, I'm here to air my grievances about many of the items that are in tonight's agenda, because I got a lot problems with it and now you’re gonna hear about them. 

My first problem is with your contract with someone out in California to become a Human Rights City. First of all, it's pretty bold that you all are paying a California consultant to help you tell the outside world how amazing you are at human rights.

Meanwhile, you're also in the news for arresting people for feeding the hungry and fighting them in court for standing up for their right to provide mutual aid to the homeless. Plus, you actually have world-class conflict specialists on staff and are literally the home to the world's international think tank for transformative mediation, so perhaps you should see if your OWN staff members already have some of these skills before paying someone on the other side of the country money that will not go back into Dayton's economy.

I see too that you're trying to renew our traffic cameras contract. I would strongly urge you not to. The very first one I got in Dayton was followed by another that I got 30 seconds later. That's a clear double jeopardy violation, but challenging it is so cumbersome that most people just pay the fine, and so you're essentially charging a speeding tax on the poor, which doesn't actually make residents safer, and lines the city’s pockets with the dollars of the working class. Not to mention that with the incoming and previous federal administrations both in mind, citizens are demanding LESS, NOT MORE surveillance. Plus, do you all really want to do this the month that UFOs are literally shutting down the local military base? Also, the Dayton police should be repealed and replaced with a public safety force anyways.

Once again, the City Wide Development Corporation contract looks suspicious. Unfortunately, given your recent contract favoritism, I (and many other Daytonians) don't trust this commission to select contractors in an equitable manner. I think the city needs a full review of the current process before you enter into any more contracts with our money, because the current one is not trusted by the community.

Also, if the plan is to provide office spaces for more defense contractors, who will help ensure that Dayton is never-again known as a city of peace, but forever as a city of death, then I wholly oppose its remediation. As former Dayton sister city committee chair and former vice president of the Dayton Council on World Affairs, I urge you to cut ties with Holon, and you should immediately vote to boycott, divest, and sanction the so-called "state of israel" before republicans and your fellow democrats in the state legislature and Dewine make it illegal to do so any longer. As someone who teaches about genocide, denial of genocide happens not only after it is over, but while it is actively taking place, and I believe your support for a rogue state, whose leader who is wanted by the ICC for genocide, is both illegal and immoral.

Residents are scared, and we’re asking for you to be more creative and proactive about protecting ALL of our rights in this city, including abortion ones, Matt. We ARE going to need you, (even before the next mayoral election, in which I’m hoping to unseat you, Mayor Mims), to truly start to take an active stand on everything, and (more importantly), to be on the right side of it. Because we're going to have to fight hard for those rights soon against our federal and state governments. 

I, for one, believe that it's high time you got on the forefront of the masses instead of stabbing the working and oppressed classes in their collective backs both here and halfway around the world.

Free Palestine, and Free Dayton.

 

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