Best Town Meeting

Bothered that many residents knew little about the city's "community" light-rail plan, representatives from the Brush Creek Neighborhood Council, Midtown President's Council, Northland Neighborhoods Inc. and Southtown Neighborhood Council brought city leaders and light-rail planners to the people this July. What started as a deadening run-through of preselected questions quickly became a spirited display of citizen attitude. During the Q&A session, light rail opponents, many of them decked out in matching yellow T-shirts, quickly lined up to voice their gripes. Occasionally, a tiny, elderly woman in the front pew would stand and interrupt them by screaming, "Don't you want to know about the environment?" The meeting's indisputable high point came when a giant bald man approached the microphone. "How can you tell such lies in a house of God?" he boomed at the panel. "I take offense to that," responded light-rail backer and former councilman Ken Bacchus, who then, as if to out-weird his hairless questioner, babbled for a few minutes about a stretch of rail that no one had mentioned.