The Village and its residents are represented by five Commissioners. They are elected at large. This means that everyone in the Village can vote for any Commission candidate, and any elected Commissioner represents everyone in the Village. A Commissioner may imagine, or wish, that he or she had a limited constituency within the Village, but the fact is each Commissioner represents all of us equally. Commissioners are paid by all of us. The Mayor is paid $4000 per year, and the other four Commissioners are paid $2000 per year each. The job description is the same for each Commissioner other than the Mayor.
Bryan Cooper has been a Commissioner for two years. As it happens, he received more votes than any other candidate when he was elected. So to think of Orwell, if all Commissioners are equal, but some are more equal than others, it could be argued that Cooper's representation of his neighbors is more pervasive than that of his colleagues. And as a frame of reference, not only did Cooper receive more votes than his rivals two years ago, he also received more votes than any of the winners this year. He must feel some attachment to his position. He cashed all his checks.
During his tenure thus far on the Commission, Cooper has made himself conspicuous. He has generally been more argumentative, with his colleagues and with his constituents, than any other Commissioner. It's true that Bernard wasted more time, and was more eloquent and verbose in his complaints, but Cooper was more likely to be the lone Commissioner out when votes were 4-1. Cooper was also more combative with the Commission and the neighborhood. He tended to blame and accuse on a more or less regular basis, and he has been prone to wanting investigations of the behavior of others. On one occasion, he demanded an investigation of the Manager, didn't mind spending $5000 on this investigation, and when the investigation concluded that he was the problem, he wanted the report vacated. He has since suggested another investigation of the Manager. So he wastes Village money on empty campaigns. He also takes leading responsibility for extra legal consultation for the Village, so he has handed us inflated legal fees.
Cooper also not infrequently warns the Village that its postures and procedures could result in its being sued. The Village has not been sued in the past two years, and since Cooper is the only person who keeps talking about it, one wonders whether he is trying to tell us that he is planning, or ready, to sue the Village for something or other.
Commissioners are expected generally to represent the Village in various ways. The most obvious of these is attendance at Commission meetings. From the date Cooper became a Commissioner, there have been many regular Commission meetings, and a few special Commission meetings. Ross missed one meeting. Anderson missed one. Childress missed two. Bernard missed three. Cooper missed five meetings outright. He left another less than half way through the meeting, and that meeting ended an hour earlier than most. He attended two other meetings by telephone, at his insistence, and was hard to include because of the connection. He "attended" one of these early Commission meetings from another country, and he then proceeded to disrupt the meeting, because he would not control a loudly barking dog in the room with him.
Within those meetings, a level of decorum and propriety is generally expected. This is not specifically elaborated in the Charter, but most normal adults would presume it. Cooper is quite regularly argumentative and rude in his dealings with his colleagues, overtalking, interrupting, provoking, and sometimes threatening. In his dealings with the public, he is likewise argumentative. He tends to be the only Commissioner who requests opportunities to debate his neighbors. In the last Commission meeting, he refused to answer a direct and simple question from one speaker, simply staring at her instead, and conspicuously ignored another, who pleaded with him to stop texting and pay attention to her while she was addressing the Commission. He eventually alleged that his activities with his cell phone represented doing "research," and he still refused to do the speaker the courtesy of suspending whatever it was he was doing, so he could even appear to care what she was saying.
Elected officials in the Park are generally expected to appear at public functions. Cooper is deliberate and methodical about absenting himself from them. A year or two ago, a visioning meeting was arranged for the Commission, largely to address problems caused or materially contributed to by Cooper. He was the only Commissioner who did not attend. Later, when the meeting was reported by the mediator hired to conduct it, Cooper asked if he could "vote" on a decision made by attendees. He clearly had not the slightest comprehension of group process, and failed completely to recognize that the purpose of the meeting was an exercise in collaboration, not a specific vote. Because of his persistent complaints that the Village, and the Commission, and the managerial staff, do not do as he personally would like them to, he has declared a strike against the Village and its residents, and he refuses to attend any community events. At former Mayor Ross' recent "State of the Village Address," a large series of slides was displayed, showing a number of community get-togethers of various kinds and for various purposes. Cooper was included in two photographs, and those two were taken at Commission meetings. He has been asked many times, most recently by his colleague Anderson, to attend Village functions, and it appears he simply refuses.
Since the inception of our Manager form of management in the Village, Commissioners are liberated from managing departments themselves, but they are now charged with submitting, in writing or verbally, evaluations of the Manager's performance. There has even been some debate and significant disagreement about how these evaluations should be presented, with Cooper insisting the evaluations should be in writing. During his two years in office so far, he has been responsible for two yearly evaluations. He has submitted neither of them. He alleges "legal advice" not to submit the evaluations that are his responsibility (he doesn't reveal who the attorney supposedly is), but this has not kept him from routinely criticizing the Manager on the record and at Commission meetings, including a range of formal accusations.
So we have a problem. We have a Commissioner who accepts our trust and our money, and the responsibility to represent us, and costs us considerably more than his salary, but who returns almost nothing. And what he does return is mostly disruptive and undermining to the Village. He does not appear to "represent" the Village and its residents in any way. It's not even clear he represents himself. For two years, he and Bernard wasted a great deal of meeting time, every month, insisting that meeting minutes, which they portrayed as incomplete, faulty, and frankly illegal, be corrected with various amendments and inclusions. At the meeting this week, Cooper joined the others in passing six sets of minutes, with no corrections whatsoever. And these minutes represented meetings of the same Commission, and were prepared by the same Clerk, as all the minutes that were so invariably considered faulty. It appears Cooper's greatest devotion in the Village is to struggle, find fault, blame, and disrupt. And waste residents' money.
No comments:
Post a Comment