COUNCIL COMEDY

    The City Council always attracts a strange variety of ducks. Some mere puppets, hand selected by the rich folks to do their bidding, their autonomy limited to asking for privy breaks and seconding motions to adjourn. Some are pure nitwits. Others you can equate to self-ordained ministers who have heard the “call” and decide they are just what the voters need. Then there're the opportunists intent on lining their wallets by selling out to developers or whomever.

 Fortunately, for the community, most are good, decent, folks who legitimately want to accomplish what we really need. And they've done a pretty good job. Just look around Naples.

  But, it's the nitwits you remember most. One, who I’ll call Erhard Gerbil was the champion numskull. I was summoned to a budget workshop to defend the number of vehicles in the proposed budget. If memory serves, we probably didn’t have more than a dozen at the time. Erhard had decided that since we policed such a small area--about sixteen-square-miles--we could get by just as well on alternative forms of transportation. Once, Gerbil had asked why we didn't pedal our way to calls on bicycles and I'd explained why. This prompted my book, I'm Peddlin' As Fast As I Can.

  We were familiar with the budget workshop process. Every year, or at least when the new Council members came aboard, we had to educate them and answer the same questions. Some incredible! A couple of examples:

  "If your Uniform Officers could stop all the crime, couldn't we fire all the Detectives?" This idiotic question didn't require an answer. Anyone who'd ask it, couldn't comprehend why. And,

  "If you only run three shifts--days, evenings, and nights--why do you have to hire more than three officers?"

  And it was always difficult to explain to these dopes that some officers didn't want to work 365 days a year, and needed sick time, vacations, training, and stuff.

 None, however, could surpass Gerbil for blatant stupidity. He sat with his peers, at the semi-circular Council table, shuffling through a ponderous stack of papers. A slight, sixitish man, he had the scrubbed-pink complexion of a pampered infant. For attire, he favored Naples haute couture, the riotous pinks, greens, yellows and plaids of the golfing set.  

  Poor 'ol Gerbil had caught a dog fish in the gene pool, cursed with the Who cut the cheese? grimace of a restroom attendant in a Mexican restaurant.  His pained countenance, was in marked incongruity with his vivid and raffish attire. Indeed, stripped of his fine feathers, Gerbil could’ve resided in a Dickens novel, perched high on a stool at a clerk’s desk, green eyeshade shadowing pinch-nez glasses, quill pen meticulously inscribing precise numerals in a moldy ledger.

  This time it wasn't bicycles. "I’ve done some more research and maybe bicycles aren’t the best way to get this exploding police fleet under control. Are you familiar with the New York City motor scooter program?"

  I told him I was. "Yes, Sir. They're using Vespas, I believe, instead of horses to patrol Central Park."

  "Horses?" he said. I could see from the dreamy look in Erhard’s eyes that I’d made an error. Horses, huh? I could envision us hiring wranglers, buying tons of hay, and getting used to saddle sores. So, I quickly added:

"They don't really like or want the scooters but had to switch to them because of the Hippies. Seems the Hippies, who were causing all the problems, found out that if you applied a lighted cigar to a horse's, er, private parts, the beast immediately lost interest in police work and became totally committed to becoming a bucking bronco."

  A house of laughter caved in on Mr. Gerbil and that was the last we heard of bicycles and Italian motor scooters.