by Oaffy Duckley
In a shocking press conference last week, Danville mayor J.H. Atkins announced that the city was facing an unprecedented $20 million budget shortfall. While defending his mayoral administration’s fiscal policies, he cited the fire department overshooting its budget by more than 800% as the principal cause of the shortfall. Itemized receipts reveal that the city fire brigade’s deployments to Centre College in the last year alone superseded the average annual budget of most other cities the size of Danville in the region.
Condemning the spike in costs related to emergency responses to failed attempts at cooking and/or smoking weed in Centre dorms, the mayor gave a dire warning: either stop setting off the fire alarm, or the city will be forced to shut off essential services like water, electricity, garbage disposal, and winter street plowing. However, the mayor assured anxious citizens that no matter how indebted the city or county became, they would somehow always be able to find enough money to build a brand new Boyle County jail, even if it meant sacrificing all the first-born sons in Danville.
The department’s Fire Chief argued that the situation was being exploited for political gain by the mayor ahead of Kentucky’s May 19th primary elections. However, he also warned that if the fire alarm crisis continued to get out of control, Centre students risked becoming the proverbial “boy who cried wolf.” In an interview with the Centonion, he stated, “Well, at a certain point, after so many false alarms, you just don’t even bother anymore. I mean, lots of students are like, ‘Why would I get out of bed at 3 A.M. for the tenth fire alarm this week?’ And, eventually, that line of reasoning spreads to the fire department, too. I mean, why would we even bother sliding down the firepole from the top floor of the firehouse, putting on our firesuits, getting all our firefighting equipment, firing up the fire engine and driving over to Centre when we know there’s no actual fire, it’s just somebody smoking up the kitchen? It’s a whole lot of effort for nothing, y’know?”
It remains to be seen what the practical ramifications of this political firestorm of a crisis, if it truly exists, will be. Or is it all just a big smoke and mirror show by conniving local politicians? Only time will tell, but the Centonion promises that we will continue lighting a fire in the hearts of our readers, inflamed by our relentless pursuit of the facts to clear the fog of the smoke-filled backrooms where decisions are made so that the truth can spread like wildfire on campus.