Why Does RSM Mayor Carol Gamble Hate Kids?
Introduction
Great question: why does RSM Mayor Carol Gamble hate kids? How did we get here? Well, in mid-January 2024, parents who have their kids at the Boys & Girls Club at the Bell Tower section of city hall received notice that after about 15 years, their contract wasn’t being renewed with the city, and they’d be closing forever in June 2024. At the same time, the OC Register ran this article that the city would open a museum in that space.
This museum would cost $300,000 and only be open from 11 am to 3 pm, Monday to Friday, for a city that is 24 years old. The grand plan was to have this open in time for the city’s 25th anniversary on January 1, 2025. They claim they have knick nacks going back to the 1920s that will somehow be super interesting. Some of the quotes from city council members about it are pretty shocking and totally out of touch; please give that short article a read.
How did this happen?
Carol Gamble has been on the city council since the city was founded in 2000, with a short break in the middle, for a total of 17 years so far. She was anointed Mayor in December 2023 because she is up for re-election in November 2024, and that’s how they play this game. Her first action after the Christmas break was to work unilaterally with the city manager, Jennifer Cervantez, to let the Boys & Girls Club know that their contract was canceled and to get the OC Register to run this puff piece as a distraction thinking that no one would notice, but boy, the parents noticed, and they were MAD.
Carol is 61 with no children that I am aware of. She was absolutely shocked when many people showed up at multiple city council meetings to express how mad they were. This decision was made by a childless elitist who has been in power far too long and is totally out of touch with the community. This decision was not on the council agenda, was not voted on, and caught other council members by surprise. There was no public review or anything of the sort.
Carol is getting close to the end of her career, so she really wants something that will memorialize her forever. She has a massive ego, so what better way to do it than by having a museum exhibit that praises her for being one of the people who made RSM a city? RSM being a city was a bad idea originally and continues to be bad, probably because of the people in city hall.
What’s next?
A lot of well-informed and articulate residents showed up to express their outrage. They went through all the various budget items that the city pisses money away on and showed what a meager expense this was. Many families rely on this resource, and the answers they got from Carol were unsatisfactory. We heard that Carol didn’t return any emails on the subject, which is not a surprise; she has never returned one of my emails. When people tried to call her extension at city hall, the phone simply rang, it didn’t route, and it didn’t go to voice mail; a resident said they let it ring for four minutes.
Carol made two very telling comments; even though she isn’t supposed to chime in during public comments, she often does anyway because she doesn’t care. First, she blathered on about how her husband does volunteer work, and she has supposedly given or raised money for the Boys & Girls Club. These items are not relevant and likely, mostly untrue, because we would have heard about them. Carol doesn’t do anything out of the goodness of her heart unless she can talk about it to virtue signal. The next thing she said was that they are only required to give the club 30 days’ notice to cancel their lease, so she thought she was being nice by giving them six months’ notice, as though she was being generous. It was truly stunning and tone-deaf.
What residents were demanding, and rightly so, was for this item to be agendized, with public comment and an open vote on it. This council doesn’t care what the public says because they will always vote against an overwhelming display from the public if the issue is something that will personally benefit them.
Summary
Everyone currently at City Hall, other than Jerry Holloway, needs to go. Carol Gamble and Tony Beall are up for re-election in 2024, and it is important to get them out. Tony only cares about the Toll Road Agency and ribbon cuttings, and Carol only cares about her legacy now that the Dove Canyon Plaza housing project is dead. Carol is arrogant and out of touch. If the residents can force the contract to be extended at least a year, then Carol and Tony can be voted out, and real work in this city can finally begin instead of all the worthless things this group tend to do.
