Hamburger Square

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Okay, so, I belong to a few committees concerned with the progress of downtown. One of them I have been attending for 4 years is the Downtown Advisory Committee which is held by the city on the second Tuesday of every month. It is open to everyone.

We were both at the same meeting and somehow Mr. Hammer came away from that meeting with completely different information than I got.

“Really, this was just a bunch of city staff with a couple of token downtown business people. This is the group that decided the best thing to do was to just ticket all the delivery drivers who parked illegally and that is exactly what they would have been doing if City Councilmembers Tom Phillips and Mike Barber and Mayor Keith Holliday hadn’t put a stop to it.”

It was quite interesting to see a journalist interpret something in the way that he did. The head of parking enforcement turned around and looked Mr. Hammer in the eye and told him that he, and more specifically not the parking committee, was the one issuing the warning tickets as a matter of public safety. As a business owner, I’d be an idiot if I favored penalizing delivery drivers, and therefore stopping commerce downtown. It’s a real shame that Mr. Hammer decided not to ask me how I felt. Instead, he printed a gross misrepresentation of my true stance, as well as that of others.

After that experience, I am not sure I would believe anything he writes.