There is a article from annieli concerning this: www.dailykos.com/...
President-elect Joe Biden has tapped former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg to serve as Transportation secretary, according to multiple reports.
Hell no. I say that as a professional civil engineer working in development and infrastructure for more than 30 years. I get that Biden for God knows what reason wants to have Buttigieg in his Cabinet, and Biden’s transparency gives this all the appearance of a token LBGTQ Cabinet appointment, because that is exactly what this will be. I guarantee there are many better qualified persons with far more Transportation knowledge and experience who also happen to be gay, and who would have been worth consideration.
Biden must not have even looked past Mayor Pete.
In the city of Lexington, KY, our state has had an openly gay man, Jim Gray, as mayor. Jim Gray is a light years better pick than Mayor Pete.
Please look at his wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/…
Briefly:
- the current Kentucky Secretary of Transportation in the Andy Beshear administration. He is the former mayor of Lexington, Kentucky (Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government) from 2011-2019. Gray served as the city's vice-mayor from 2006 to 2010 before being elected mayor in November 2010. Gray won re-election to another four-year term on November 4, 2014
- In 1996, after more than 20 years in the construction industry, Gray accepted an offer to become a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.[6] The Loeb Fellowship program is created for accomplished practitioners "to pause, study, and reflect at a great University [to] enable those who designed and built our cities to return with renewed insight and energy.
- Gray's father started the family construction business in 1960, and it has since grown to become one of the twenty largest design-build firms in the country.
Really, how did this guy not get the call?
I have had the opportunity to work on many large projects, including some with Gray Construction, my first in the mid 80’s building the Toyota Plant in Georgetown, KY, and many since. They are among the elite.
I am confident that there are others out there who would be as good as Jim Gray, but not too many, all of whom would be light years better suited for Secretary of Transportation than Mayor Pete.
Biden is making a blatant, political pander here, I expect, to the gay community. Biden would have done so much better with that community, in my estimation, if he instead selected an extremely qualified individual who happens to be gay.
The magnitude and complexity of our crumbling infrastructure won’t withstand another Elaine Chow, an invisible and voiceless Secretary selected for who she was married to and how much money she had, not her knowledge.
We have seen many with no experience to justify their Cabinet appointments, like Ben Carson at Housing, Rick Perry at Energy, and who can forget heck-of-a-job Brownie at FEMA. They, and many others, have been disgraceful, pathetic choices. Sure Mayor Pete drives on roads, and sure his town had a public works department, and so do hundreds of other mayors of cities much, much bigger than his.
All of us who have to depend on the people we hire understand that having the right person is everything. Politics, though, is the exception it seems. Unqualified individuals in key spots seems to be a given, and certainly tolerated.
The Jim Gray’s of this country did not need a Mayor Pete token role model, and neither does the gay community today. America’s infrastructure problems and large and complex, and we need a Secretary of Transportation who is extremely qualified in that field, not a spokesmodel. Biden had been making many good picks for his Cabinet, but this?
No. just no.