Mayor: City will turn down KFC pothole money

<p>Petaluma will say “Thanks, but no thanks” to restaurant chain KFC’s offer to pay $3,000 for pothole repair, Mayor Pamela Torliatt said at Monday’s meeting, after two council members said they’d prefer the city reject the money and a speaker urged the city to accept a competing offer from an animal-rights group.</p><!-- Nothing to do. The paragraph has already been output --><p>Council members Mike Healy and David Rabbitt said the city should pass on the offer. Healy suggested the council schedule a discussion of the issue, but Torliatt said she’d rather turn down the money than have the council spend time debating it.</p><p>“I don’t want to make it an issue, because the time of the council is too important with some of the pressing issues facing us,” Torliatt said. “We’ll consider it closed and we don’t need to agendize that item.”</p><p>Earlier in the meeting, after a member of the public said the city should instead accept a $6,000 offer from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Rabbitt said the city should reject any proposal to pay for pothole repair in exchange for stenciling logos on top of the new asphalt.</p><p>“It just feels a little sleazy all the way around, no matter who you take the money from,” Rabbitt said. “While we know our finances are dire, sometimes it just isn’t worth the aggravation on these kinds of things.”</p><p>Torliatt initially said the city would stick with KFC’s offer, which was made after she entered the city in the company’s nationwide contest to select four communities where potholes would be “refreshed by KFC.”</p><p>Petaluma was selected because of its past notoriety as a chicken-raising capital and pothole capital, which Torliatt highlighted in her entry letter, the company said.</p><p>The KFC logo would be applied to only one pothole with temporary chalk in exchange for the money, Torliatt noted.</p><p>“It was to have some fun around the fact that we were the chicken capital and the pothole capital at one time,” she said.</p><p>A few days after KFC announced Petaluma as one of the four cities selected, PETA sent Torliatt a letter, saying it would double the money if the city instead used an “evil Col. Sanders” logo that accused the restaurant of torturing chickens.</p><p>Later, two street-repair advocates offered $5,000 if the road patches were marked “pothole capital.”</p><p>(Contact Corey Young at corey.young@arguscourier.com)</p>