Serving on a City Council is a lot like improv theater, one suspects. The big difference is that in improv, supposedly your colleagues want you to succeed so everyone gets a good reaction from the audience.

On a council, you may want your colleagues to fail miserably. One gets a kick out of this account of a meeting of the McKeesport, Penn., City Council.

Citing Segina’s decision to draft the committee legislation himself, McCall accused Segina of failing to communicate with other members of council. 

“That’s not true, Mr. McCall,” Segina said. “I just don’t like you.” 


When I first got elected, our council had a lot of verbal fireworks. The wiseguy in me really enjoyed them. But at the end of the day, verbal fireworks are ineffective and poisonous. The problem is that from the public’s perspective, any one performer is rarely 100 percent right or wrong. Darryl Segina may think he’s God’s gift to politics, and maybe he is, but that does not matter. The public assumes he shares a responsibility for what is going wrong on that council. 


I rarely refer people to the trolls who leave anonymous comments, but in this case, they are worth reading in that post. People blame both council members for the problem. It may well be one is more dedicated to the public good – I’ve no idea. In a way, it does not matter. When you engage in public fireworks, everyone shooting off fireworks gets burned.