Garden City council: Forget foreclosures! Gimme pizza!

The city council of Garden City has offered what must be the lamest reason ever given for not hearing from aggrieved residents: They had a pizza party waiting and didn't want it to get cold.

A story that appears in today's Detroit News describes how several residents appeared before the city council to complain that their houses had been taken in tax foreclosure and that the city turned around, bought them, and had sold them to a real estate speculator. The residents seem to have some decent gripes: One had the money to pay the back taxes but thought more time remained before foreclosure, and at least one seemed to have lost his home even though he had paid the taxes for a recent year.

In short, it sounds like the people were exercising their Constitutional right to petition government for redress of grievances.

But the City Council said that the meeting wasn't an actual meeting to declare new business, and was instead a formality meant to swear in new members, before the council exercised its right to the pursuit of pizza.

Yes, things look pretty grim for the seven Garden City residents who showed up before their legislative body in hopes of saving their homes. Sources quoted in the story suggested that the matter won't be up for review, as they were washing their hands of the matter before digging into a hot pie.

Clearly, it's amateur hour out there in Garden City. We realize that this legislative body may not normally weigh such vital matters as people's homes being taken by the county and snapped up by speculators like so many slices of pizza. But a word of advice: Just say your meeting was going to be a quickie to take care of civil formalities. No reason to bring pizza into it, unless you want an extra topping of scorn.