Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

In Ron Kim’s abbreviated world, the old proverb holds true: If you sling enough dung up against the barn door, some of it has to stick. And when it comes to fear-mongering over the city’s aging Police Department, the sophomore Public Safety commissioner is a veritable manure spreader.

Kim has found his latest rally point in his battled to get a the Public Safety castle planted in the ground. This time, he’s pointing to recent failures of the police department’s non-emergency line, which has recently left callers literally hanging on the line listening to the melodic sound of the ringing tone. The fickle bankruptcy attorney claims the problems started two months ago and have shut the system down three times since.

“You can’t leave police, fire and EMS hanging,” panicked the Public Safety windbag. “We’re talking about emergency situations.”

Emergency situations indeed. Let’s back up a bit for those folks on the little bus: the city police have experienced recent problems with their non-emergency line. In other words, the standard 911-emergency dispatch that most people call when the need help is still functioning fine. This system is county-based and then dispatches police or emergency services via digital radio.

Another important thing to note is that most people, when faced with a life threatening situation, prefer to dial three digits that have been ingrained into their memory for a lifetime instead of flipping through the phone book to find the seven-digit number of the Spa City cops. In an emergency, most people would no sooner call the police department’s main line than they would the fire station down the street.

Amazingly after two years in office, Kim still doesn’t realize this. What he also apparently doesn’t realize is that the phone problem he claims to be an ongoing problem “since December” has actually hampered the line since September. But these must be superfluous details in to include in Kim’s world.

So if this phone situation was as dire as Kim or The Saratogian claim it to be, then why wasn’t something done in September? Could it be that Kim and now-deputy Eileen Finneran were too busy playing partisan politics -and proselytizing on the steps of City Hall -to administer needed repairs in their respective offices? Inquiring minds want to know.

Kim also didn’t miss a beat to throw in a quick dig at the Johnson administration for this perceived failure of the phone system. In discussing the issue with The Saratogian, he claimed former Mayor Valerie Keehn took the bull by the horns, “identified a solution” and was just about to make the repair when the evil mayoral administration of Scott Johnson came in. That’s when everything went to hell.

Instead of moving forward, Johnson called for a more thorough study of the entire City Hall phone system, with the thought of upgrading the whole building. This seems to make the most sense, seeing as though the building’s phones are more than likely antiquated by the digital dial-by-name systems of today. Mind you, the situation facing the department shouldn’t go uncorrected; it just fiscally behooves the city to find a sensible solution to this issue, rather than a knee-jerk fear-induced reactionary move that will likely cost significantly more and produce markedly less.

But knee-jerk reactions seem to be the modus operandi for Kim, who has used flimsy suppositions and innuendo to base most of his presumptions about the Public Safety office and the city in general. he’ll offer a more compelling reason to waste more tax dollars during the council meeting this evening. But those expecting a shred of sensibility from this guy should also expect to wait on the ringing line for quite some time.