So, it's "budget season." And our crack Commissioner/Architect/Attorney/Accountant/Manager/Arborist is on the case again. He sometimes says he's been through five budgets in his tenure to date. Others say he's been through one budget, but he's been through it five times. The latter appears to be more accurate in that he asks the same questions of two different Managers and three different Finance Directors, and no matter what answers he's given, or how many times he's given them, he always votes against the budget. He seems to approach this exercise by saying, "The answer is no; what's the question?"
And his methods are always the same. He asks a million questions, in much more detail than anyone else, he insists on asking them in advance and getting advance answers, and then he asks them again in workshops and again at budget hearings. He appears to have forgotten that under his leadership, a Charter Review Committee recommended a significant change in the Charter, the Commission agreed with him, and a majority of voters also agreed with him. The change was to use a professional manager to oversee the functioning of the Village. But from the day he became a Commissioner himself, he has been inexorable in bucking one Manager, then another, at absolutely every step along the way. He has been explicit in letting it be known he does not want a Manager making decisions for the running of our Village. It appears he wants to make the decisions. It's never made clear what he intended in suggesting we switch to a Manager form of management, or what he thinks the Commission at the time meant by agreeing with him, or what he thinks the rest of the residents of the Village meant in agreeing with him. Perhaps he anticipated that he would become a Commissioner himself some day, even explicitly attempted to install himself as Mayor, and was simply arranging for the Village to hire him an Executive Secretary. It was a very significant and expensive change for us, so I hope he was expecting to be Mayor, or Emperor, or whatever he had in mind, for a very long time.
So now, he is complaining about Village finances. Central among his complaints is that oversight of them is tardy. In case anyone thought he had no insight about why they might be tardy, he himself airs a quote from the Manager: "Continuing to answer your ongoing e-mails and requests is putting us in a position of halting our operations." This is in English, and he quotes it. In bold. So we have to assume he understands it. He is creating the problem of which he then complains. But in case anyone thought the Commissioner was entirely without empathy, he does address the Manager's complaint. He declares it untrue. We learn from him that his hectoring, nagging, dragging, gnat-like, time-consuming, spitball-launching approach to dealing with our administrative staff does not in fact interfere with their ability to function, and we know this because the Commissioner tells us so. So there.
Do you know the joke about the mother who gives her son two ties for his birthday? He goes to his room, and comes out wearing the blue one. Oh, she whines, you didn't like the red one? That's what our dear Commissioner does, except he isn't nearly as whiney and pathetic as he is passive-aggressive and deliberately sabotaging. He demands what he doesn't need and isn't entitled to, then complains when he gets it, and other responsibilities are set aside to provide it for him. Or he complains when he doesn't get it. It appears most likely he doesn't much care whether he gets what he requests or not. His goal is to complain and criticize, and he is laser-like in his ability to find something to criticize or about which to complain. It's like that obnoxious game we played in elementary school, when we would enter into a conversation with another child and simply, repeatedly, mindlessly, annoyingly, frustratingly respond to anything the other person said with "why?" It gets old in a hurry, even for the brat doing it. Most of us gave it up very long ago. But not all of us.
So it seems we once bothered our Commissioner friend by having a Manager he considered incompetent. Now, we have another Manager he apparently also considers incompetent. It's hard to know what to do here. Do we conclude we are batting 0.000 in trying to find a quality Manager, because one Commissioner says so, or do we conclude that the majority of Commissioners, in two different Commissions, are probably more right than one and a half Commissioners who complain about the Managers, and in fact complain about everything? Is it hard to do this math?
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