How Does Your Shoe Taste, Mr. Pintella?

City Council President Paul Pintella seems to have a chronic case of "foot-in-mouth" disease.

Over the years he's admitted to forging the signatures of young athletes on letters of intent to play for a specified baseball team so their spots on the rosters were safeguarded. Yet he didn't think he, as a City Council person, should be sanctioned in anyway for this illegal act.

While attending a conference related to his then job at the now defunct Urban League, he felt is was legitimate to charge some travel expenses to the City as Councilman because he was also acting in the interest of Trenton.

In the heated battle over the ill-fated Leewood Development proposal for a large chunk of South Trenton, the Council President uttered the infamous "sometimes a new brick is better than an old brick" line. He also made a statement threatening those in opposition to the project with being "run over" by the train of progress.

So it should be no surprise when Paul Michael Pintella is quoted in the paper as discounting people who openly disagree if not outright oppose his presence on City Council as "johnny-come-lately's."

If Mr. Pintella was half as astute as he is glib, he would recognize the fact that longevity and tenure in town are not prerequisites for observing and understanding how woefully deficient our City Government has become. Just because someone is younger than the Councilman or has lived in Trenton less time than the Councilman doesn't mean their concerns should be summarily dismissed.

It doesn't take a genius to see how and where City Officials are failing us. And if anyone should be chided or dismissed for being oblivious to the facts and history, it probably should be those who continually elect the same inept leaders.

If Mr. Pintella were truly a believer in being cooperative and progressive, he would embrace these recent arrivals and invite them to the table rather than sending them away with a verbal wave of the hand.

Instead, he'd rather sit alone, exalted on his high horse, packing a lunch of shoe leather.

We really have to be able to do better than this.