Mayor Bill Foster's Broken PR Machine

So we saw these postings tonight about Mayor Foster and U.S. Congressman Bill Young at a groundbreaking for a new therapeutic playground yesterday at All Children's Hospital. That's strange, we thought, this seems like a pretty important event, with local elected officials and lots of business and hospital leaders attending, and there was no mention of it anywhere on the city's weekly schedule or the press releases page about it, and we thought it had to be at least as important as the opening of a barber shop.

That got us to thinking about how poorly Mayor Bill Foster relates with the press, and his broken PR machine certainly doesn't help(just take a look at this PR posting from two weeks ago, it's blank, that's right, nothing there when you click on the link. We even emailed the contact listed on the city's PR web-page about it and it's still not fixed, and we received no response two weeks later). UPDATE: their posting was fixed within 24 hours of this post, guess somebody at city hall is reading our blog.

In addition to his public relations department problem, it doesn't help Mayor Foster much that he has openly admitted his discomfort with the press, and wonderful quotes like these certainly don't help his image:

     "We have little pockets of little tiny cancers that create undesirable activities"

     "I feel that our council members are getting beat up in the community and I haven't properly given them all of the bullets to defend themselves"

     "Unless manna falls from heaven, we are unlikely to see any future phases in our lifetime"

and we could go on and on with his awkward quotes, but I think you get the idea.

We finish this posting with one of the best examples of a PR blunder by Mayor Bill Foster: the time when he had T-shirts printed with "Don't TABOR me bro!" emblazoned on them to try to influence lawmakers to reject the taxpayers' bill of rights, but in the end the only thing that they rejected was Mayor Foster(and his T-shirts).

So another of Foster's stumbles is added to our growing list.