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Y'all have to read this - Small Town Mayor Gone Wild
Coopertown in a small town northwest of Nashville on I-24. The Mayor is a major clown - Big time racist redneck - thinks he owns the place. It is a major speed trap, and has recieved a lot of publicity.
The County DA's office filed a motion yesterday to remove him from office - here is the complaint:
It is mind-boggling what this guy does/says. Basically, trying to get anyone that doesn't agree with him arrested, going so far as to plant evidence. He targets soldiers from nearby Fort Campbell, as well.
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Holy Crap!!! What a douche bag... When are these type of people going to die and leave reasonable people here to co-habitate?
They are probably just waiting for someone to go first. Whadda think LIAC? You'd be my hero!
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We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
I would willingly give up my life if it meant all racist, bigoted, jerk holes were wiped of the face of the earth forever afterward!
You really would be my hero then!
__________________
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
I gotta believe his style didn't change suddenly once elected, you have to wonder what these people were thinking to elect such a turd like this guy? He should be in jail, not the mayor's office.
Coopertown was not incorporated until 1996 - Crosby won the most recent election by 14 votes. Of course, he has his cronies for supporters. The town is growing rapidly (close to Nashville), and is a lot bigger than when he won. People have been trying to get him out of office for a while, now.
This was a part of the "good old days" that I'd just as soon forget. Driving from Illinois to Florida was a real drag in those days. Hardly any interstates and a lot of small southern towns living off of traffic ticket revenues. You could make better time riding a bicycle.
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“So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldn’t find honest employment.” —Mark Twain
This was a part of the "good old days" that I'd just as soon forget. Driving from Illinois to Florida was a real drag in those days. Hardly any interstates and a lot of small southern towns living off of traffic ticket revenues. You could make better time riding a bicycle.
Interesting...I just read this article last night:
Quote:
Interstate highways
Roads to somewhere
Jun 22nd 2006 | CHICAGO AND ST LOUIS
From The Economist print edition
The highways that have changed America's social and economic face
“OH, WE have 12 vacancies: 12 cabins, 12 vacancies. They, uh, they moved away the highway.” Thus Norman Bates explained to Marion Crane, in the 1960 film “Psycho”, why the desolate Bates Motel had no other guests. Miss Crane had left the main highway after driving from Phoenix, Arizona to southern California, roughly along the east-west route that Interstate 10 now follows. She thus became one of the first victims, albeit fictional, of the multi-lane, limited-access highways that were beginning to reshape America. Those highways began expanding rapidly after President Dwight Eisenhower, 50 years ago this month, signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 which committed the government to invest heavily in a national network of interstates.
The law offered to pay 90% of the costs for the new highways, with relevant state governments picking up the rest of the tab. Most of the new roads were at least four lanes wide, with no level crossings; these standards became mandatory in the 1960s. States were allowed to bring their existing toll roads into the system provided they were up to snuff.
Besides the obvious economic reasons, one of Eisenhower's goals was to improve national security: the network that he authorised was often referred to as the National System of Interstate and Defence Highways. The generals thought that better roads would make it easier to move military convoys around in case of attack, as well as to evacuate big cities in a hurry. The overpasses were made high enough so that ballistic missiles could be transported beneath them. Though the atom bombs and invaders never came, life in America would never again be the same.
The country now has 46,876 miles (75,440km) of interstate highways coursing the length and breadth of the country, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Some of the interstates cut long, smooth and straight paths that form a giant grid across the 48 states. The longest, I-90, is one of four east-west routes that span the whole continent; it stretches 3,000 miles and goes through 13 states.
As well as encouraging ever more Americans to hit the road, the interstates have remade the country's social and economic landscape. Several long roads were already criss-crossing America before the new system came into being. The Lincoln Highway ran east to west, and segments of it formed the Main Street of many towns along the way. Route 66 ran south from Chicago to St Louis, before bending through the south-west into Los Angeles. These routes had their drawbacks. Travel was slow, because of weather, bottlenecks and all those small-town intersections. But they also let Americans see more of their country and compatriots along the way.
The interstates replaced social interaction and serendipity with speed and efficiency, and some have lamented the change ever since. By 1962 John Steinbeck was writing about the disappearance of antique stores, factory outlets and “roadside stands selling squash juice”. He complained that the new roads would make it “possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”
The interstates paved the way for fast food chains such as McDonald's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which set up shop near the access ramps. Besides changing the way that motorists eat, the new highways also transformed the ways in which companies moved their goods. One reason that Wal-Mart became a cost-cutting behemoth was because it exploited the logistical advantages of the new system faster than its competitors did.
Manufacturers now treat interstate highways as if they were part of the assembly line, clustering factories near the access ramps so that parts and raw materials can arrive at the right moment. Of the 15 new car and truck plants that opened in America between 1980 and 1991, all but two were built along Interstates 65 and 75, which form a narrow corridor running from Indiana and Michigan down through the Ohio valley into Kentucky and Tennessee. Since then, carmakers have built more plants farther south along I-65, which ends in Mobile, Alabama, and have also branched out along intersecting east-west routes such as I-40.
Carmakers and retailers are not the only ones to relocate because of the interstates. People have too. Besides linking distant places to each other, the system has encircled many urban areas with “beltways”, which let motorists move between surrounding suburbs without having to bother with the cities. Once commuters began whizzing (on a good day) around those beltways, centrifugal force did the rest, propelling office space, staff and tax revenues away from the centre.
The big question now is whether Americans are willing to keep spending more than $80 billion a year of their tax money to maintain and upgrade the system. Clifford Winston, at the Brookings Institution, has tried to measure the benefits reaped from improved logistics. Although this is clearly an imprecise exercise, he reckons that government-financed highway investments have run into steeply diminishing returns since the 1980s.
Such calculations do not include the huge benefits that Americans gain by being able to get around easily in their cars. But those drivers are also taxpayers and voters. And growing numbers of them are turned off by the corruption that goes with pork-barrel spending. Highway bills are a notorious source of rancid pork.
Some state governments—which face tighter fiscal constraints than the federal one—are toying with ideas for letting the private sector take over stretches of highway. Now that the interstate network is built, the challenge is to maintain it. For $3.8 billion, Indiana agreed this year to lease its toll road, which is part of I-80 and I-90, to an Australian-Spanish consortium for the next 75 years. The consortium will maintain the highway and keep the tolls; and it will no doubt face public pressure to do a good job. But it will not be selling squash juice from roadside stalls.
SPRINGFIELD — One Coopertown police sergeant testified that Coopertown Mayor Danny Crosby offered “a steak dinner” to the officer who arrested one of his critics and told him to send the woman a “nasty e-mail” under a fake name.
And another officer, who says he was wrongly fired after 30 days on the job, said it was clear Crosby didn’t want a traditional police department in the small Robertson County town.
“He wanted storm troopers,” said Corey Mead, who now works for the Sumner County sheriff’s office as a jailer.
Several current and former Coopertown officers took the stand Monday in a hearing to determine whether Crosby’s mayoral powers should be suspended immediately while an ouster lawsuit against him is pending.
They described an administration in which the mayor pressured them to target Hispanics, soldiers, nonresidents and political foes during routine patrols. Several said Crosby told them multiple times to ticket more drivers so city leaders could spend money without a property tax.
Coopertown is getting at least 30 percent of its revenues from traffic tickets.
Charles Talley, a former Coopertown cop, said the mayor told him to ticket “out-of-towners” and “soldier boys” — referring to military personnel — because they’d be more likely to pay the fine than come to court. He testified that the mayor also told him to ticket Hispanics for some violations rather than arrest them because the tickets meant more money for Coopertown.
“He said you could probably write (Hispanics) as many tickets as you want,” Talley said.
At the peak, he said he was writing between 75 and 100 tickets a month. But he testified he was later transferred to the night shift when his production fell off.
Case draws a crowd
Prosecutors had subpoenaed more than 30 witnesses for the hearing, which will continue Thursday, and on Monday said they had finished their primary case after calling about 18 of them. Some potential witnesses, such as Police Chief E. J. Bernard, were in court throughout the day but were not called.
About 30 spectators also turned out. Some, such as Neal Hancock, have no real connection to Coopertown — they were merely attracted by all the media attention Crosby’s received.
“I just happened to be up here today on business and thought I’d stop in and see what’s going on,” said Hancock, a Ridgetop resident.
Court adjourned after 8 p.m. Monday, and Crosby’s attorney declined to comment.
Crosby is accused of threatening and intimidating enemies in the community, shaking down passing motorists for the city’s profit and abusing the power he holds as mayor in the town of about 3,100.
Crosby himself did not testify during Monday’s hearing before Chancellor Laurence McMillan. Clad in a dark suit and cowboy boots, he sat a few feet from the witness stand, often scribbling notes as witnesses discussed the allegations against him and at times reacting to their testimony with looks of surprise.
He and the court heard past and present officers say they’d been told to try to arrest political adversaries.
“I’ve seen him (be) intimidating, very intimidating,” testified current patrol officer Jonathan Coulon.
When later asked by a prosecutor if he considered Crosby a “dangerous person,” Coulon replied, “Yes, sir.”
Harsh but not illegal, Crosby’s attorney says
Crosby’s attorney, Timothy Harvey, repeatedly said Monday that, while the mayor’s actions and words sometimes came out harsh or stern, he did not violate state law.
“In essence, heavy handed or not, he didn’t do anything wrong and you didn’t do anything wrong,” Harvey said to Sgt. Charles Williams in court, referring to the mayor’s common practice of calling officers to report traffic violations he witnessed himself. Williams agreed.
Under cross-examination, Charles Consiglio and other officers said they’d never specifically been told to invent criminal charges for the mayor’s political foes, and several testified they were never explicitly ordered to racially profile or make illegal arrests.
Officers also testified that they didn’t pull over motorists who weren’t breaking the law in the first place.
But Coulon testified that Crosby had told him to take several citizens, including Susan Slawson and former mayoral candidate Sam Childs, to jail “if you see them out on the street.” He said he took that to mean arrest them without cause.
Former chief Paul West also testified against the mayor Monday. West said he had worked for the mayor as a teen and that Crosby recruited him before his election to aid in the “reconstruction” of the Coopertown Police Department.
He was hired as a captain in November of 2004 after Crosby was elected and became chief shortly thereafter.
At first, West testified, police presence around town increased, as did tickets. But when people started slowing down because of the increased patrols, West said, ticket numbers started dropping.
“He basically wanted those (ticket) numbers to stay as consistent as possible,” West testified.
Slurs and threats
West, who also said that he saw Crosby threaten and belittle residents and make racial slurs, was terminated four months after he started. He said it was, in part, due to clashes with the mayor on personnel issues, as well as the mayor’s insistence over his objections that Coopertown officers patrol on Interstate 24. At the time, the mayor said he was fired because he had let a required certification expire, a fact he confirmed under cross-examination.
Mead, though, also testified that he heard the mayor use racial slurs on several occasions, including the day he was sworn in as a volunteer reserve officer, Martin Luther King Day in 2005.
After the brief ceremony at city hall, Mead testified, Crosby “extended his hand, and I shook his hand, and he said ‘Happy James Earl Ray day,’ ” referring to the man who shot and killed the civil rights leader.
Mead’s employment with the department lasted only 30 days. He testified he was terminated because of accusations he made an inappropriate sexual advance to a female city employee. He said that accusation was untrue.
More than 500 residents signed a petition to oust Crosby. Assistant District Attorney General Dent Morriss told the court that prosecutors had been “very reluctant” to try to remove the mayor through judicial means.
“These sort of things are for voters to decide at election time,” Morriss said. “Mere mistakes, that’s one thing,” Morriss told the court. “We believe there has to be something more than that.”
I can't believe that this kind of thing can still happen. Wasn't there any clue before this person took office that this was how he was gonna run things? It reads like something out of "Roadhouse".
"This is my town. And don't you forget it."
(Yeah, I said Roadhouse. LOL)
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