City Council Convenes
January 20, 2016
By Temple Ligon
Columbia City Council held its regularly scheduled meeting last Tuesday night, January 19, following an afternoon work session.
One of the big events at the work session was a money search – how to fund a $20.6 million upgrade at Finlay Park. City council was told it could finance as much as $29 million without a threat to the city’s credit rating. The financing would come through hospitality taxes, 2% from restaurants and bars.
At the regular council meeting beginning at 6:00 p.m., another park was proposed, this time on Ft. Jackson property to observe its centennial. Ft. Jackson began May 27, 1917. It is America’s largest basic training center, where more than 1 million soldiers have trained during peacetime and times of conflict: WWI, WWII, Korea, Cold War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Balkans, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Ft. Jackson trains more than 72,000 soldiers every year, all which generates $2.3 billion in economic impact.
Command Sergeant Major (R) Marty Wells, President of the Gateway to the Army Association, presented the ideas behind Centennial Park. It will be entirely on post and will operate regularly as a place to gather, especially among visiting families. It will include a soldier statue and an amphitheater.
Wells said the city is being asked to contribute $500,000 over two years for the construction of Centennial Park, opening day being the centennial, May 27, 2017. Council concurred.
Council’s attention moved from respect for the military to an appeal from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which wanted to object to the use of Asian elephants by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey at the Colonial Life Center. PETA was represented by Rosemary Thompson who failed to include the news that in early March of last year the same circus organization and its parent company announced the end of their use of elephants, putting all the company’s traveling elephants out to pasture, as it were, by 2017.
The City of Columbia turned down PETA’s request to occupy the sidewalk next to the arena with a six-foot-tall mechanical elephant, and Thompson was asking for a last-minute change of heart by council. Council didn’t change, but everybody offered to help locate a private landowner who could accommodate PETA’s placement of its model of an elephant.
The circus went public almost a year ago to declare flat-out its planned termination of the use of elephants. PETA plowed ahead anyway, even though they could be basking in their victory instead of protesting at city council.
