Parks Board Appointment

According to multiple Massillon Review sources, Massillon's beloved Mayor for Life, King Francis the Eternal, will be appointing Esther Bryant to the Massillon Parks and Recreation Board.

Her appointment is contingent upon City Council voting to approve her.

Esther Bryant is the Executive Director of Lighthouse Visions, an agency which provides services to area foster children.

We wish Esther Bryant well as a member of the Parks Board, and our community can only hope she exercises independence, and makes decisions that are best for the parks, not decisions that are best for the mayor.

We hope Esther Bryant realizes that when the voters of Massillon passed a .3% income tax for parks and recreation, they believed their tax dollars would actually go for parks and recreation, not to subsidize the debt for an unprofitable golf course, or to buy a restaurant.

We hope Esther Bryant realizes the hollowness of the mayor's "pledge" to the people of Ward 4;

"Mayor Cicchinelli told 4th Ward residents there are no plans to sell Shriver park, or many others, and he pledged to Councilman Tony Townsend that he would help him rename Shriver by urging his Parks and Recreation Board appointees to vote in favor of it" (The Independent, August 31, 2010).

Of course the mayor's appointees to the Parks Board, Michelle Del Rio-Keller and Timothy Muzi both voted against the name change.

We hope Esther Bryant doesn't agree to start selling our park system off, piece by piece, so that the mayor can have the cash to bail out his years of fiscal mismanagement.

Our crack Massillon Review research team has learned that Lighthouse Visions, the agency that Esther Bryant is the Executive Director of, was scheduled to receive $8,000 dollars from the mayor's Fiscal Year 2010 CDBG budget (program year period July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2011).

www.massillonohio.com/commdevelopment

Look under "FY 2010 CDBG Action Plan."

Page 2 in the 2010 Action Plan.

We sincerely hope that her agency's reliance on the city's CDBG budget, as proposed by our mayor, does not diminish her independence on the Parks Board.