Well, I probably shouldn’t post on this for a couple days but I see people are coming by to look so what the heck. The thing is, this referendum is an emotional thing for some of us to begin with; and then to go to such a meeting it can take a little while to get things back into perspective.

By “such a meeting,” I mean one that has cheerleaders who can’t behave and people asking fake questions just so the answerers can try to manipulate the feelings of the skeptics in attendance. You know: an infomercial.

A few things got through the haze, mostly the ironic. Such as, having a question-and-answer session without many answers. Such as, having the neglect of your maintenance department revealed when you’re asking for two more big buildings. Such as, having $200,000 men telling the rest of us what we can afford. Such as, having an oversight committee of the same group that will be doing the building–fox! henhouse!–and BTW the same group of people who fought the impact fees that could have reduced the size of the mess we face now.

Such as, having a gung-ho group of volunteers who can call every voter in the district about the referendum but not to gather input on the plan to begin with.

Whether I think the plan itself has merit will have to wait for another day, I’m afraid.

“Can we count on your vote?” the young man asked.

I don’t know exactly why it turned me off, but it did. Maybe it was the obvious scripting. Maybe it was the fact that it turned up on caller i.d. as “unknown caller” with the number 000-000-0000. I told him I was undecided–whether I am or not–because I really don’t know who was doing the asking.

Update later in the day: OK, now I’m untangling the threads, no thanks to the Chronicle.

A town hall meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Monday at the Egyptian Theatre by the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce. It will feature speakers from both the school district and the ReNew Our Schools Committee. Following the speakers will be a question-and-answer session that will last until all questions from the audience have been addressed, according to a news release from the chamber of commerce.

Does it sound like the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce and the ReNew Our Schools Committee are separate? They’re not. ReNew Our Schools is a PAC in the care of Mark Kerman, who serves on the Chamber’s board of directors. Notice that District 428 Superintendant Paul Beilfuss is a board member, as is Daily Chronicle publisher Jon Pfeifer. It does not strike me as being particularly honest to pretend that ReNew Our Schools is some sort of grassroots effort when it is a CoC project.