If Old Drum Is Our Symbol Then You Have To Walk the Walk
At Monday night's City Council meeting in Warrensburg the City Council wrestled with how to make up for a $929,450 deficit in the fiscal year 2020-2021 budget. It seems one of the easiest ways to do that is eliminating the Old Drum and Friends Animal Shelter and it's associated services. You can read more about this here.
Bluntly, for a town that prides itself on being the place where the phrase man's best friend came from. A town that actively uses Old Drum, the dog who inspired Senator George Grahm Vest's "Eulogy For a Dog", as a symbol of our charm and friendliness. Cutting all animal services seems wrong.
And Mayor Bryan Jacobs agrees with me. During discussions Finance Director Marcella McCoy presented four options to eliminate $500,000 of that deficit through service cuts. Two of her ideas eliminated the animal shelter, and a third eliminated the shelter's director. (Both ideas contained more than just cutting the shelter.)
During the discussion Jacob's indicated he favored reducing general fund positions, or a combination of general fund positions and the shelter manager over getting rid of the shelter altogether. When pushed by former mayor and Councilman Casey Lund if he was OK with eliminating general fund positions Jacob's responded:
I don't like any of these plans … But the animal shelter is a service that we need to continue to provide to our community. If we're going to be man's best friend, and every one of our logos has that dog on it. We need to have that animal shelter.
And that's where I come down on this too. Nothing about the situation my town finds itself in is good. But if you're going to trade on the dog that gave us the phrase man's best friend then you better walk the walk. Anything else is just a load of dog crap.
Rob and his wife Kathy call Warrensburg home. Their the parents of an eight year old greyhound. The preceding is the opinion of the author, which may not reflect the views of Townsquare Media Sedalia / Warrensburg.