Fairgrounds public hearing move amounts to much ado about very little

Published by Michael Casson December 17, 2010 in Local and Politics. Gee, that was worth the trou­ble. A few hours after Metro Coun­cil com­mit­tee chairs Megan Barry and Vivian Wil­hoite announced Wednes­day that they had moved a pub­lic hear­ing on Ten­nessee State Fair­grounds leg­is­la­tion from Jan. 10 to Jan. 13 — to avoid a con­flict with col­lege football’s cham­pi­onship game and “accom­mo­date as many cit­i­zens as pos­si­ble” — Barry said the date actu­ally hadn’t been nailed down yet. Today, Barry and Wil­hoite reported back with the new date — no, scratch that: new time — for the hear­ing: Jan. 10 at 5 p.m. rather than 5:30. Yes, you read that right. After get­ting some blow­back from a few upset coun­cil mem­bers, the hear­ing was moved by an entire 30 minutes. From the lat­est Barry/Wilhoite announcement: We appre­ci­ate the con­cerns raised by Coun­cil mem­bers regard­ing the date for a pub­lic hear­ing meet­ing on pro­posed leg­is­la­tion regard­ing the Fair­grounds — Ordi­nance Nos. BL2010-770 and BL2010-820. Based on the feed­back we received, we have decided to go back to the orig­i­nally planned date of Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 10th. We will move the start time to 5:00 p.m. in our Coun­cil Cham­ber in the His­toric Metro Courthouse.