Work meetings can be long.

And boring.

And uninteresting.

Ugh.

It is an hour — or two or three or four or more — that we will never get back.

Even more ugh!

Thankfully — a saving grace, as it were — I had the good fortune to sit next to a guy who also wanted to be anywhere else other than where we were in that work meeting earlier this morning. He was secretly watching on his laptop the tape of the public discussion part of a City Commission meeting last night. The main topic was the city’s maintenance — or, as it turned out, the lack thereof — of a very old and beloved ice rink. The rink has had to be closed for an indefinite period while the city decides what to do about a major and costly repair that needs to be done before it can be reopened. Will the powers to be allocate the necessary money to do the work? Or will they just tear the place down and sell off the land, which is worth a king’s ransom, to developers who want to build a bunch of new homes on it.

Residents showed up in droves in the meeting room at the city building and, one after the other, trekked up to podium and talked passionately about the value of having the rink in the community for youth hockey and figure skating and implored the city to “do the right thing” to fix the place and then to also set up a consistent maintenance plan so as to avoid many of these kind of situations in the future. Nobody spoke in favor of bulldozing the place. That was not an option, according to the people.

My friend is a big hockey guy who helps coach his son’s team at that rink. At one point, he whispered to me that all the city leaders “acted as if they were really listening to the people and valuing what they say when in fact they probably have already made up their mind and can’t wait to get the wrecking ball out to the ice rink site.”

It was, at that moment, that it occurred to me that I just saw this same kind of situation play out in Cleveland with the Browns quarterback competition. Everybody — EVERYBODY — wanted Shadeur Sanders to win the job. Nobody cast a vote for Deshaun Watson.

Head coach Todd Monken took it all in, said he never took into consideration the opinions of the fans and many media members alike and named Watson the starter.

What?

The voice of the people is ignored once again.

Browns fans can someday soon commiserate with all the people who tried unsuccessfully to save the old ice rink in my town.

Steve King