City Council Candidate Evaluations - Candidate Tim Faremouth Candidate Name: Tim Faremouth Education: BA Business Communications and Accounting, Eastern Michigan University Work: Retired Other: Active in Knights of Columbus (where he has held several top leadership posts) and related charity work. Youth Minister. Contact info: (313) 550-8609 & faremouth4council@yahoo Platform: Stated he “will be an advocate for long-term solutions that include multiyear, zero-based budgeting; bottom-up, prioritized spending; and multitask efficiencies.” He also promised to make “reasoned and common decisions.” That is all the information we could locate on this candidate regarding a platform. Campaign Viability: High Candidate has been seen most days out campaigning doing a combination literature drop/door-to-door effort. He seems to have covered a very large portion of the city, especially the central area. He also has very nice, professional looking literature and has done at least one mailing. The literature is a bit low in content, though. It is mostly lots of pics and graphics, but it does look nice. He has one color signs that placed at many homes in the city. The Knights of Columbus are one of the city’s larger clubs/groups of its type, so this should really help the candidate, especially in the primary. One intangible is who he is backing for mayor. It seems some of his supporters strongly favor one candidate while others strongly favor a different candidate and this can become a problem, especially as we move into the general election. Our Overall Impression: Imagine Tim Tiebow running for Council. (And we like Tim Tiebow, btw.) The candidate is very well respected for his faith and family values. He has been described as a very honest and charitable person. Our issue, is we are not even close to convinced he has an understanding of our city budget or finances. Again, we are in a huge deficit and the candidate has avoided discussion of any specific financials. It seems all of this experience was in private sector accounting, and this can be VERY different than municipal accounting. He uses private sector buzzwords that, in our opinion, don’t relate well to how a city is run. Finally, he wants to “prioritize” spending, but never states what his priorities are. This bothers us the most because was a lack reasonable spending priorities by current and past Taylor officials that got us into this mess. Finally, “multi-task efficiencies” reminds us a bit too much of some of the so called “public safety departments” where cops are trained to fight fires. Most cities who tried this had HUGE cost over-runs. So going back to our football analogy, the candidate needs to prove he can pass the ball if he wants to be quarterback. We really like him as a person; we just need to know a lot more about his goals and vision for the city – so we will split the difference and give him a “neutral” rating. Our Grade: “Neutral” (3 of 5 stars )
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 14:54:24 +0000
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