Mayoral candidate Steve Benjamin at the Gourmet Shop this morning.

Steve Benjamin says he was NOT at the “emergency” Cromartie “Advisory Committee” meeting at Bishops’ Memorial AME Church on March 11.

I had reported previously that he was the featured speaker at that meeting, called right after E.W. Cromartie was forced to resign from Columbia City Council.

Mr. Benjamin said, at the latest of Jack Van Loan’s Kaffeeklatschen for him this morning at the Gourmet Shop, that no one had checked with him before announcing that he would be there, and that he was in fact elsewhere, at a fund-raiser. Nor, he indicated, would he have attended the meeting.

Of course, it was tough for anyone who was not a member of the committee to know who was there, since Adam Beam of The State was not allowed in. His way was barred, and he was told that what was going on was “choir practice.”

So consider the record corrected. The blog regrets the error.