After an emotional council meeting that ended with a member walking out and therefore losing a quorum, there are increasing signs of panic among the leaders of Galveston.
Editor & Publisher reports via the Galveston County Daily News that Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas and City Manager Steve LeBlanc have ordered city employees to stop talking to the media, always a sure indication that things have gotten out of hand.
Leigh Jones, the Twittering Daily News reporter, had this along those lines: “Officials giving hesitant answers to questions about martial law.”
Love or hate the media, when a government bureaucracy goes into a defensive hunker-down mentality, it’s not because things are going great.
We’ve got people on the island (or, perhaps, still stuck in a traffic jam trying to get to the island; we’ll let you know what we hear.
— Richard Connelly
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2008.