A week after receiving heat for a tweet he posted from a City Council meeting, Democrats are again criticizing Republican city clerk candidate Zach Bonahoom for a tweet – that is nearly five months old.
“Saw parking Nazi on the corner, so I quickly went and fed every meter on the block. Got the stink eye but it felt so good! ;)” the candidate posted on Twitter on May 13.
“This tweet is especially inappropriate given that the City Clerk is responsible for the parking enforcement department,” the local Democratic Party said in a news release. “In other words, Bonahoom referred to his own potential employees as Nazis.”
“Parking Nazi,” Bonahoom, 22, replied, “is kind of a term that is used downtown, and that tells me there is a problem.”
Though the Democrats’ criticism comes late, calling just about anyone who is overeager to use their authority a “Nazi” is a terrible – and inappropriately overused – pejorative. Yes, the “Seinfeld” “soup Nazi” references only encouraged it.
But it belittles this fact: After Adolf Hitler seized control of the Nazi party, Germany essentially became a dictatorship, which the Nazi party enforced at every level of government and on every block. Nazis not only denounced democracy and capitalism but segregated Jews, blacks, homosexuals and political opponents – culminating in the slaughter of six million Jews, many of whom suffered incomprehensible torture.
These were the Nazis, not the irritable proprietor of a deli or a woman who enforces the parking laws passed by a duly elected city council.
There’s another problem with the tweet: The city has parking meters to keep spaces open, so downtown workers don’t take spaces all day. The city has parking officers to enforce this policy. Randomly feeding the meters is a way around this goal – a goal the city clerk is responsible for enforcing.
Cost of transcript
Bonahoom and other Republicans have called for transcripts of City Council meetings to be online, and Bonahoom said he would hire court reporters to perform the work. He also called for reducing the clerk’s office budget by 25 percent.
The going rate for court reporters is about $45 an hour. But for a two-hour council meeting – where a dozen people may speak in addition to the nine council members – the cost might be closer to five hours to review the transcript with the video to make sure each person is property identified.
There’s $225.
Plus, the buyer pays more than $4 per page of transcript. A two-hour council meeting would produce about 100 pages or more of text – add at least $400.
Tom Rolf of Rolf Reporting Inc. said his company formerly provided the service for the county commissioners at a cost of about $12,000 to $16,000 a year.
