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And Toledo City Council is meeting at 2:00 Tuesday
Tuesday will be a busy day for the Marines!

Szollosi, chairman of the city's intergovernmental relations commission, has called a 2 p.m. meeting Tuesday to pose "some tough questions" to Finkbeiner. The full City Council meets later Tuesday.

"We basically want the mayor to apologize," he said. "It's very disappointing."

As criticism spread over the Toledo mayor's decision to put the kibosh on downtown urban warfare training by a Grand Rapids-based Marine battalion, other city leaders were doing damage control today.

"On behalf of several colleagues on the city commission and numerous citizens, we would like to apologize to the community of Grand Rapids and the families of the reservists," Toledo Councilman Frank Szollosi said.

"The mayor asked them to leave because they frighten people," Finkbeiner spokesman Brian Schwartz said. "He did not want them practicing in a highly visible area."

Schwartz said the mayor in 2006 informed then-police Chief Jack Smith that he didn't want the Marines back. Finkbeiner was unaware they planned to return until Friday, Schwartz said. "Unfortunately, the chief of police never communicated that down to his subordinates, so nobody handed it down to the mayor," Schwartz said.
Wonder why the chief didn't 'communicate that down'? Could it be because he recognized it was stoopid?
Smith said Saturday that Finkbeiner should have made his wishes known to current police officials. "He told me he did not want them, as he put it, 'playing war in Toledo,'" Smith said of the 2006 training session. "I told him, as a former Marine, that if one young Marine's life is saved because of training he or she received in Toledo, Ohio, then it was worth the inconvenience."

Maj. Dan Whisnant, the battalion's commander, said he was disappointed by Finkbeiner's decision. The training is vital to their combat mission, given the deployment in 2006 and part of 2007 to Iraq's western Anbar province, he said. "It prepares the guys for the real sights, smells, sounds of an operating city," Whisnant said. "It heightens their sense of awareness. You don't duplicate it."

Whisnant said he was unaware of any complaints by Toledo residents or the mayor. "The reason we rescheduled it (the training) is we had such a good training experience," he said. "It went so smoothly last time."
Posted by: Sherry 2008-02-11
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=225416