TAMOA Elections Are Approaching

As the TAMPOA Board election approaches, we think it is important that our readers who live in Truman Annex understand that the current board is not unanimously supported by all Annex residents and that there is severe disagreement with the failed policies that continue to be pursued by Tom Tukey and the current board. It will be up to the voters to put enough pressure on, and extract enough promises from, the two currently announced candidates, as well as any nominated from the floor of the January 29 annual meeting, so that the candidates elected will not be able to renege on those promises as so many politicians do.

As part of a full airing of the discontent, we will publish some of the letters to the TAMPOA Board, or Board members, from Annex residents.

We begin with a letter from a resident who has lived in the Annex a very long time. The letter was sent to Sterling Christian, TAMPOA Operations Director (who passes such letters on to the Board), The Board to its discredit did not even have the common courtesy to favor this resident with a reply. Here is the letter:

Sterling:

This message comes as a sad commentary on a mishandled situation. Time once was on our side to bring this to a resolution. Now we have added an inestimable amount of damage to our "credit" with the local community. When this board took aggressive legal actions they mortgaged our property values in both a monetary and non-monetary way. This was done without proper dialogue with the owners. The 06 budget was a meaningless [word omitted in the original] regarding the legal costs. The proposed increases in 07 should be scaled back and the board should operate within the budget. Another year will come quickly enough to set another budget.

Cars were coming through the annex on Southard from the very beginning when Pritham started the Annex. They will be going through the Annex long after most of us have left. And we the owners will continue to pay excessive legal costs brought on by an impatient pursuit of a political entity (City Commissioners) who will continue to spend taxpayers money to counter our legal actions. Trying to force a legal solution on a political situation is foolish.

If expensive legal research was required to verify the validity of our title it should have been done with a qualified estimate of the costs and a communication to the owners. While the board can contend they are defending our property values this has a shallow ring in my ears. This action has done as much to erode property values in the Annex as anything I can remember in the twelve years my wife and I have been here.

What should happen now is to scale the legal activities back to a holding action. Then hire a PR firm for far less than the legal fees to begin a planned PR effort to keep our issues in the public consciousness through the next couple of election cycles in KW. City commissioners are not normally long range planners but they are elected by a public that usually figures things out. Even if we tried to do the right thing regarding the planned traffic flow- pattern we did it in the wrong way.

[Name in the original withheld]