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Lost and Searching

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Lost and searching

William Seward

English Composition 101

12/7/13
J. Trammell

Poverty in a thriving city

I know a writer should write about something that they have at least a little knowledge on the subject. At risk of making myself look quite foolish, I am going to write about what I feel is high unnecessary poverty levels in Memphis, Tn. Which is the highest poverty level metro city in the U.S. I personally believe from my research that a lot of the problems of our poverty levels is the Memphis city council. They don’t appear to know what they are doing, an example of this is, Mike Mathews of local 24 news wrote an article on 6/18/13 that stated, the council members are debating right now to cut hundreds maybe 1000s of city jobs, or to raise taxes to a historic high. The Tennessee state comptroller is in the background saying if the council can’t produce a balanced budget, he will. The Mayor A.C. Wharton wants to increase taxes 40 cents and get rid of 400 employees! An example of possible corruption which will be mentioned and then never heard about again is. A few months ago, The Shelby county school board had decided to merge all the schools in the area on July 1st. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with this or not but, an outside audit was ordered by the Shelby county school board which showed that almost 50 million dollars in stuff like cars, laptops, and hard drives are just missing! The city council are all just saying they have no idea what has happened or where it is. This gets me to thinking. Why would the Shelby county schools order an audit from an outside source when they have their own internal auditor who said everything was accounted for on June 30th according to board member David Pickler. I know this seems to be incomplete, but every comment on the subject is “I don’t know”, or “no comment” and that’s it. I heard on the radio earlier this week that the council is to vote for themselves a raise soon. I tried to find information as to how much of a percentage they were or are going to voe for. Unfortunately I was unable to find information as to how much of a percentage they were or are going to vote for. My solution to this situation is to find some way to inform my fellow citizens of the multiple stories that are written on the goings on at the city council which are predominately messed up and full of blunder and incompetence. These are the same people who are paying our sanitation workers $40,000 a year! (poverty for some) That’s almost double my pay and I am a journeyman at a large construction company with 24 years of experience! Why not give us the citizens a raise in our pay. Memphis is a growing city with many corporations and industries moving in all of the time yet in 2011 the census bureau said that Memphis is the poorest metro area in the United States, and has gotten worse each year since. The Tennessee comptroller has had to step in on multiple occasions in order to fix Memphis’s budget. So they must feel that this council we have in office needs to be watched, as I do. There are so many news stories on the city council, they would all support my paper, maybe you should check out a few, like News channel 3: Memphis city council makes emergency descision to escape financial ruin, they have so many projects going on to build new parks, or to buy autozone park all while they are teetering on having someone else come in to control the city, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. In closing, I am lost in politics. Yet I k now the council is the place to search for answers to my fellow Memphians who work so hard by my side for low pay which is what I believe has been attracting these big businesses and large corporations, which that is great as far as work but what about the poverty levels?

References
Local 24 news, Mike Mattews
Eye witness news 3

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