Taxation Without Representation

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.

You Call It.

In the Residents' Bill of Rights in our Charter, the following statement occurs:

(7) No Unreasonable Postponements. No matter, once having been placed on a formal agenda by the Village, shall be postponed to another date except for good cause shown.

If the fence Ordinance has been worked on by the Code Review Committee for over two years, has come before the Commission several times during the past 1-2 years, has been sent back for reworking after reworking, keeps coming back to the Commission, has been the topic of a workshop, and a lame duck Commissioner with the last Commission considered himself not authorized, by virtue of his self-imposed lame duck status, to rule on it, would a further delay of two months now be considered an "unreasonable postponement?"  Does the buck ever stop anywhere?  And would it matter if the reason for the postponement was that one Commissioner wanted more information, having failed to come to any meetings of the Code Review Committee, or the workshop?  How much more, and what more, does he want?  In fact, it seems he didn't know there had been a workshop.  Workshops, by the way, are not free. We pay staff and our attorney to attend them.

Or suppose another Commissioner wanted a postponement, because he was newly elected, hadn't bothered to research the matter before the meeting (or during his campaign, or at any other prior time), and felt that the over 2 years of Code Review attention, 1-2 years of Commission attention, and workshop, was too much of a rush job.  He wanted us to take it slow.  I tried to tell him before he got elected that he wasn't ready for this job, and that in BP, slow usually means never, but he disagreed with me.  So why is he now proving me right?  Is "don't know the first thing about it, and couldn't be bothered to find out" a pretty "good cause" for postponement?  This, by the way, is the same person who was evidently so oblivious to what was going on in the Village, that he just found out about the FPL hardening project the day the concrete pole was erected in his yard.  People talking about it for months?  Nope, unaware.  Three wood stakes in his yard for two months?  No, some guy said something about buried lines.  Two announcements mailed in advance by FPL?  Nope, didn't notice.  And this is the Commissioner (our Mayor?) who now says the fence issue has been sprung on him too suddenly.

And suppose a third Commissioner simply went along with the other two, because she didn't have the wherewithal to take an independent stand?  And presumably also hadn't done enough homework to have formed an opinion before the meeting.  Do these sound like compelling enough reasons for further pussy-footing?  There is of course the possibility that a "higher power" directed all three to delay, because he himself didn't want the fence Ordinance, but we won't even go there.

And add to that that many residents came to the Commission meeting to plead with the new Commission to vote for, or at least on, the fence Ordinance already, as a number of residents were being hung up waiting for a ruling.

"Unreasonable postponement?"  Or maybe careful and due diligence?  You make the call.  And after you've made a call, contact all of our Commissioners, and let them know what you think.  Either scold them or thank them for the delay.  And if you think they did the wrong thing, let them know they committed a Charter violation, and violated your rights as a resident.

How Can I Put This?

So we got to see our new Commission in action tonight.  It's a little hard to describe.  Perhaps the beginning would be a good place to begin.  The new Commission met one of its first and most important goals: it unceremoniously, in mindless bloc, dumped the Mayor.   It then replaced her with the new Commissioner who has no experience with the Village and its functioning, had already said he would now, having become a Commissioner, have to find out about the issues, and was the low vote-getter in last week's election.

It then went on to consider the business of the meeting.  An important issue was the new fence Ordinance.  The mindless bloc, having heard from resident after resident that they wanted the Ordinance passed tonight, deferred the matter for a couple more months.  This bloc is the people who complained so much that the Commission doesn't listen to the residents.  And they deferred it allegedly to receive more resident input, which was exactly the thing they ignored tonight.  They wanted, for example, a workshop.  What they really had to want is another workshop, since we've already had one.  But they had no way of knowing that, since none of the bloc attended it.  Cooper, when he was outed for not having attended the workshop, couldn't bring himself to acknowledge the fact. It's been a while since I've seen anyone look that foolish.  Neither he nor his new colleagues has ever attended any meeting where the fence Ordinance has been discussed and reworked.  The fact is, it wasn't clear what they wanted, except somehow to run and hide from the fence Ordinance.  They never said what their real problem was.  Cooper used the word "smokescreen," which is probably right.  The interesting question is, what's behind the screen of smoke?

This new Commission also passed a Consent Agenda, which included six sets of minutes from prior meetings.  Cooper always joined Bernard in making the old Commission waste lots of time going over the minutes, insisting on change and addition after change and addition.  This time, they simply passed all the minutes with no scrutiny at all.  They gave no reason for their grossly inconsistent approach to what they usually like to portray as a huge problem that needs abundant correction.  And the funny thing is, Bernard and Cooper used to complain that they, and the residents, were being steamrolled in suppression of accuracy of the minutes, because they got outvoted by the brute majority.  Now, they had the majority, in Cooper, Watts, and Jacobs, the latter two being new Commissioners who ran on Bernard- and Cooper-inspired campaigns of openness, honesty, transparency, and accountability.  This was it.  The big opportunity to demand and enforce complete and accurate minutes.  It appears none of them really cared one bit about the minutes, or openness, honesty, transparency, or accountability.  These theories were merely excuses to whine and accuse.

One thing the new Commission did is demonstrate repeatedly that the new Commissioners don't know or understand the issues, and stumbled around trying to figure out what they were doing.  They seemed never to figure it out.  Watts made a motion that she then wanted to vote against, which she isn't allowed to do, so she wound up being the only person to vote for it.  Jacobs gave a clear and careful explanation, in support of Cooper, as to why it was wrong for elected officials to carry "police-style badges," then voted in favor of keeping the tradition.  (It might have occurred to him that he was going to get one, too, and his would be that super nifty one that said "Mayor.")  Cooper was taken to task by a resident over texting while the resident was speaking, but he first ignored the resident's repeated complaint of disrespect, then claimed to be doing "research."  (He was texting with Bernard, who stayed to monitor, if not perhaps supervise, the proceedings.)  In any event, it appears our new Mayor didn't think it was his job to ask Cooper to put his toys away, or maybe he didn't disagree that residents should be treated so disrespectfully.  And again, you really had to be there, to watch Cooper completely ignore a resident who was pleading with him to show some courtesy and pay attention.  This scene ran a close second to Cooper's being confronted for not having come to the workshop just like the one he now claims he wants, and simply staring dumbly at the resident who was confronting him.  These are what Jon Stewart calls "Moments of Zen."

Fortunately, the new Commission had Ross, who was remarkably gracious, and the Village attorney to tell them what to do, since they very clearly had no idea.  Not only do they not have any grasp of the issues, but they also have no understanding of the rules for meetings.

No doubt they will improve some.  The Manager has offered to help them, and so has the Village attorney.  It appears Roxy Ross will fill many gaping holes in the capacity of her new colleagues.

In reality, the meeting was pretty pathetic.  At the end, Bernard commented about how courageous it was that the Commission heard such strong and impassioned urgings for action from so many residents in attendance, but it was able to ignore all of them and defer the fence issue to February.  Bernard, Cooper, and the new Commissioners are the people who made such a fuss, and so much campaign hay, over the idea that the residents were to be heard, respected, and obeyed.  Bernard used to complain so bitterly that the majority of the Commission turned a deaf ear to residents.  Tonight, he praised his puppets for doing exactly that.  It did look a little less like puppetry tonight.  It looked more like someone operating a radio controlled vehicle, Bernard sitting there, texting away, while his proteges lurched first one way, then another.  Well, maybe next time.  Maybe next time the residents' wishes can be taken remotely into account.  Maybe next time, the residents won't have to be insulted by Cooper's incessant texting, or playing Tetris, or whatever he was doing, while they're speaking to him.  Yeah, maybe next time.


Correction:  One of my correspondents says Cooper was not playing Tetris.  She said she could tell by his expression, and how entranced he was by his cell phone game, that he was playing Sim City.  My mistake.  Sorry.

What a shame.

The Village had an election last week.  Frankly, by all estimations, the race was pretty hotly contested.  There were two fairly clearly identifiable factions, and each faction considered the other threatening and destructive.

I sent out daily e-mails for almost a week before the election, urging people to vote.  And urging recipients to urge their contacts to vote.  Steve Bernard personally provided signs posted in various easy-to-see places also urging people to vote.

Voter turnout was meager.  It was less than it had been two years ago.  Less than 600 people voted, and there are about 1900 registered voters in the Park.  I'm saying turnout was meager, but it wouldn't be wrong to say it was a disgrace.  And frankly embarrassing. 

We live in a small neighborhood, and many people know each other on a personal level.  There was every reason to take an interest.  Few people did.  Voting is easy.  There's a central and easily accessible place where we all vote, and it's open all day, from 7 AM to 7 PM.  Anyone who couldn't be available to come out, or couldn't be bothered, could have sent in an absentee ballot.  About 50 people did.  That's part of the less that 600 total voters.

There are things that can be done.  The obvious one is to move our Village voting, which occurs in December of odd numbered years, to the general election, which occurs in November of even numbered years.  Because there are more issues on the ballot, people are more interested, or motivated, and we would get more voters.  There is a small movement against this, but it doesn't make any democratic sense.  And by the way, it costs us several thousand dollars to run our little non-productive elections.  Considering the turnout, it's a waste of good money.  We would save a lot of money if we hooked on to the general elections, as most municipalities do.

Another thing we could do is reward people for voting, or find a way to punish them if they don't.  This is a little tricky, and since the most attention-grabbing reward is money, we would disadvantage ourselves fiscally if we paid people to vote.  But we could do it.

The real problem, though, is that we as a Village have failed to inspire people to vote.  It's not clear to me how we do that, and we seem to do it repeatedly.  Do we offer uninspiring candidates, so no one has passion for any of them?  Maybe.  The high vote-getter this year got about 320 of the under 600 votes, and those less-than-600 represent less than 1/3 of registered voters.  So at best, there's very little energy, even for the biggest of the winners.  Interestingly, the big winner this time doesn't yet appear to be complaining about the lack of respect.  Neither did the big winner two years ago.  Neither did the big winner two years before that.  Perhaps winning relatively big creates a kind of conflict of interest.  Like it's hard to get Congress to make rules against PACs and lobbyists.  Do we expect them to bite the hand that fed them?  When you're winning, it's hard to get distracted by things like democracy and caring about the unknown will of the sizable majority.

(As a follow-up to the paragraph immediately above, the Miami Herald Neighbors section today had an article about last week's election and results.  The high vote-getter said she was "gratified that many people" voted for her.  So unfortunately, my apprehension was confirmed.  She was so happy about her big victory that she missed the community failure and the insult to her.  Expectations even among candidates are pretty unambitious.  All very pitiful and pathetic.)

There are some in our neighborhood who have portrayed that there are momentous issues to consider, that it's vitally important who is elected, and that the balance of the life of the neighborhood depends on voter turnout.  Even if the crises and crusades are invented, it certainly sounds like something that would move people to vote.  Apparently not.

The other side, in contrast to the crusaders, says things are going fine, and there isn't much really to complain about or stress over.  So under the threat of a possible new majority that talks as if it wanted to undo the good that has been done, and threaten our positive adjustment, that side should have been motivated to come out, to preserve their happy home from anarchists and saboteurs.  Nope.  They weren't there either.

So the bottom line is that hardly anyone votes.  Does hardly anyone give a damn what happens to Biscayne Park?  They're registered here.  This is their home.  Really?  Couldn't care less?  It's a damn shame.

And to add true insult to injury, even the few people who vote don't come to Commission meetings.  So the electors of the winners don't know what they wrought, and those who failed to get their candidates elected don't know what they overlooked and missed out on.

Now What?

The results are in.  Our new Commissioners are Barbara Watts and Noah Jacobs.  Bob Anderson was re-elected.

Watts and Jacobs ran on a platform that was indistinguishable from the ongoing complaints of Steve Bernard, supported by Bryan Cooper.  Watts has adequate familiarity with the Village and its government, though she has said repeatedly she didn't want to be a Commissioner, and she told one person she ran only because she couldn't find anyone else to run.  Jacobs has no relevant experience in the Village whatsoever, and he has no identifiable connection to or knowledge of how the Village and its government operate.  Both Watts and Jacobs ran on a platform that centered on complaints about FPL (the Franchise Agreement and the grid hardening project), and there is nothing that can be done about any of this.  A side issue for Watts and Jacobs was to clean house, to eliminate incumbents.  Since both Watts and Jacobs were elected, they have displaced as many incumbents as the two of them could.  The only thing they could have done more was to get Dorvil elected, to try to displace Anderson, but apparently this was not their agenda.  For one thing, there were 219 undervotes, which are people who voted for less than three candidates.  So assuming there was a movement to get Watts and Jacobs elected, and that movement encouraged interested participants to vote only for the two of them, any mastermind of such a movement shot himself in the foot by preventing Dorvil from getting elected.  For another thing, though, Jacobs came in third.  So if Dorvil had been elected, he would have knocked out Jacobs, and left Anderson in place.

But the issue is, what do the apparent spawn of Steve Bernard plan to do now?  The have railed mercilessly and incessantly about the FPL Franchise Agreement, but it is untouchable for the next 28 1/2 years.  So apart from punishing one Commissioner who voted for it, Childress, they cannot accomplish anything.  It's an empty issue.  They have also whined lately about the hardening project, and the concrete poles, but there is nothing they can do about that, either.  Nor would they want to if they could.  FPL are not going to change the concrete poles for wood ones.  And if they agreed to, they would point out that every concrete pole would have to replaced by 3-4 wood poles (they call it "hardening" for a reason; it's not just a simple replacement of one wood pole with another), and no one, not even the complainers, would want that.

So what will this new majority do?  Most assuredly, they will want the verbatim minutes they have been pleading for.  They will learn that those minutes will cost $1500-$2000 per meeting, a fact they have carefully avoided acknowledging, and since they also want revenues low, it is not clear how they will pay for those minutes.  Presumably, next year, they will want to vacate the utility user fees against which they also rail, and this move will knock hell out of the Village revenues, making it even more impossible to pay for the minutes they claim they want.  And to get funding for those minutes, they will have to ignore the fact that almost no one except Bernard and Cooper want them.  This will be tricky, since Bernard and Cooper, and now Watts and Jacobs, claim the will of the people is important to them.  They will somehow have to convince people that they should pay money they don't want to pay to get something they don't want to have.  Or perhaps they will just insist on paying the money and getting the minutes no matter what anyone wants.

Also presumably, they will want the lines painted on the streets, a favored refrain for two years now.  They will ignore the fact that the streets are too narrow, and no one has advised the Village to paint these lines, and they will paint them anyway.  So we drive on streets that are barely wide enough for a car, and now they have a phony bike/pedestrian path suggested on them.  Then what?

Bernard and Cooper have been fussing and fuming about the Manager, whom they would very much like to kick out.  The new majority might make such a move.  They will be met with massive resistance.  Let's suppose they power past the resistance, and get rid of the Manager anyway.  So we get a new Manager.  Our Charter  requires us to have one.  And let's suppose we underpay the new Manager, and make his or her life miserable as the old minority worked extremely hard to make our current Manager's life miserable.  So as often as it can happen in two years, we go through a succession of short-term Managers.  And let's imagine that the new majority forget their interest in hearing and obeying the voice of the people, and they lose us Managers and equanimity.  Then what?

The old minority, now the new majority, actively complain about failures of "transparency."  They have never made clear what they meant, and most or all of the assaults on transparency came from the old minority anyway, so it's not clear how they convert this into policy.  And if Bernard was instrumental in getting Cooper to run and getting him elected, and if he was also instrumental in getting Watts and Jacobs to run, and getting them elected, and if he and Cooper were active in campaigning for Watts and Jacobs, what is the chance that Cooper, Watts, Jacobs, and Bernard are not extremely active in colluding outside the "Sunshine?"  My best guess is that it's unimaginable.  So much for "transparency."

So it will be interesting to see what Cooper, Watts, and Jacobs will do with the opportunity they have just succeeded in arranging for themselves.  And I hope more residents will come to Commission meetings.  If the new majority are both wrong and blind, and they begin a series of acts that are destructive to the Village, someone will need to be there to confront them.  And besides, you would think people would be pleased to come to meetings.  After all, they elected these people.  Don't they want to come to bask in the experience they have created for themselves and the rest of us?  Maybe the rest of us would like them there, so we can thank them for providing the new, open, honest, careful, fiscally responsible Commission they gave us.  That was the deal, right?  Open, honest, careful, and fiscally responsible.  I can hardly wait.

Really?

Last night, there was a special Commission meeting.  There was only one agenda item, which was consideration of five adjustments to the budget.  Yes, the budget.  This is the thing, apart from FPL, that has gotten so much attention, especially from two Commissioners and a few allegedly interested parties, for its extreme importance to the Village, and its susceptibility to nefarious manipulation.  Threats of rolling heads, including of the Manager and finance staff, have been made over this budget.  Two residents are running for Commission in part based on complaints of secrecy, "fuzzy math," and mischief made over this budget.  Did I give the impression this matter is considered by some to be earth-shaking?  Good.

Let's say it how it was: this was a shockingly poorly attended meeting.  Fewer non-Commissioner residents were there than are usually at Commission meetings.  Meetings where the agendas are not as important to the functioning of the Village are better attended than this one was.  One of the two primary plaintiff Commissioners was not there.  He said in advance he wasn't coming to any more Commission meetings.  The other four Commissioners were there.  Most of the Village meeting regulars weren't there.  Of the three residents running for Commission as non-incumbents, only one was there.  The two who have been campaigning on platforms against secrecy, against "fuzzy math," and in support of the Commission's hearing and endorsing the voice of the residents, weren't there.  That's a level of interest in the Village?  And we're talking about people who are running for Commission.

No non-Commission resident had any advance comments about the budget.  The other main plaintiff Commissioner about alleged legislative and managerial mischief had several questions.  Every one was answered directly, completely, and in detail.  Nobody else had much.  There was no i left undotted or t left uncrossed by the Manager, the Finance Director, the Police Chief, and the Finance clerk regarding this budget.

A vote was taken.  The budget, with amendments, passed 3-1.  The Commissioner who demanded answers, and got them, voted against the budget anyway.  Not that his vote mattered.  Not that it ever matters.  He is an inveterate nay-sayer.  He's a misanthrope.  He's a hopeless and lost curmudgeon.  And he brings nothing to the table.  He has completely marginalized himself, and made himself meaningless and irrelevant.  Last night was no exception.  There is no pleasing him, any more than his absent lame duck partner can be pleased, because neither of them wants anything.  "The answer is no: what's the question?"  This is pure and self-contained obstructiveness and negativity.  We saw exactly the same thing at the last Commission meeting about the budget (See my "Bada-Bing.")

Well, we're down one saboteur.  We can only hope that if one or both of his preferred replacements wins election, they don't pick up in the same miserable, blind, negativistic place where he left off.

What a sad, sad career.

Boss

I've begun to wonder.  I thought I should check myself.  Perhaps I've made a huge mistake.

There has been fairly incessant rumbling about what the residents of the Park want.  The rumbling has come from Bernard and Cooper, and a few of their followers.  A consistent drone has focused on FPL, whether we should have signed the Franchise Agreement with them, and whether we should have allowed them to replace the old wood poles with concrete ones.  And the refrain is always that the residents of the Park didn't want the Agreement, or didn't want the concrete poles.  The most recent examples of this argument were published in the Herald's Soapbox section a few days ago, and were represented by letters from Carmen De Bernardi and Bryan Cooper.  So I've begun, as I say, to wonder.  Whether I've fallen into a trap and been unfair, to Bernard, Cooper, De Bernardi, Watts, Jacobs, and some of the others.

In my partial defense, I have been lulled by the fact of so many misstatements.  Some are distortions, some manipulations, and some outright dissembling.  Because these clinkers are so common, I have allowed myself to disqualify whole positions.  But have I, perhaps, thrown out an embryo with the contents of a septic tank?

The arguments tend to suggest two things.  One is that the majority of the Commission, the steamrolling brutes, have been mindless and unfair (sometimes accused of being criminal) in taking the positions they have.  And for all intents and purposes, we're talking about FPL here.  Yes, it's true the FPL decision was made a year and a half ago, and is untouchable for the next 28 1/2 years, but the minority still invokes it as its primary example of the problem of which they complain.  So as irrelevant and foolish as it is to waste one more instant on it, it's all they got, and we have to talk about it.  The other thrust is that the people, usually framed as something related to a majority, want something, but their wishes are ignored.  The demonstration of this theme is that "many residents have sent e-mails, or called" or whatever, making their feelings and wishes known.  Again, this position was cited in the Herald Soapbox.

Before I go on, I want to be clear about something.  I am not discussing whether the Agreement with FPL was the best idea for us, or whether we had any real say about the new poles.  Many people, in the Park and in other municipalities, felt the Agreement was a good idea.  But it's certainly debatable, as are most things.  And many of us, even those whose houses are now graced with the new concrete poles, like mine, are either not complaining or are happy about the new poles.  And no one argues that hardening shouldn't have happened, or wasn't going to happen.  There has been a bit of mischief, in terms of saying things that are in no way true, by some who want to argue about the project and what it really was, and this is a distraction.  The fact is, we could have replaced the old wood poles with concrete ones, at about one new pole to one old pole, or we could have requested replacement with new wood poles.  Had we succeeded in obtaining the latter, assuming anyone wanted wood instead of concrete poles, we would be talking about 3-4 new wood poles for every old one (not three to two), the new wood poles would have been made available by cutting down lots of trees somewhere, and the wood poles would come treated with creosote and a collection of other rot-retarding chemicals, which leach into the ground.  So it may be a bit less clear than some portray as to which kind of pole is more "environmental."  But still, these are all matters fair for debate.

What I want to discuss is the question of what the people want, and how anyone knows.  There are two primary self-appointed messengers of the people's will.  They are Commissioners Bernard and Cooper.  Cooper complains theoretically about the Village's failure to hear the people, and Bernard is specific and demonstrative.  Bernard typically relies on two things to transmit the thoughts and will of other people.  One is communications from them to him.  These communications are most often alleged to be by e-mail.  Sometimes, he will say he has received e-mail from some roughly calculated number of people.  When he claims e-mail contact, he will sometimes wave a sheaf of papers, which he says are the printed e-mails.  (And there is nothing "transparent" about a sheaf of papers containing who knows what writing, waved about, then hustled out of the Commission room without anyone's having seen them.)  He almost never names any of the senders, and he occasionally says something which he portrays as a quote.  On at least one inspection, the quote turned out to be a few words lifted completely out of context, and concluding exactly the opposite of what the e-mailer said.  What he has never ever done is presented these alleged e-mails to his colleagues, or turned them in to the Village Clerk, so they could be made part of the public record.  And apparently, he does not ask correspondents to send the same e-mails to the other Commissioners.  Even Bernard's faithful ally, Cooper, does not apparently receive these e-mails.  Stacks of reported signed petitions are equally mysterious.

Bernard's other source of information about what other people think is conversations he reports having had with them.  I'm not talking here so much about "the people," or residents at large, but consultants and other specialists.  On many occasions, these people, who tend to be under contract employment to the Village, will have articulated a position, including various "facts," to the general Commission and the Manager.  But Bernard will report having had with them private conversations in which they reportedly gave him very different "facts," and very different, often diametrically opposed, conclusions and recommendations.  It's never clear what to do with these massive discrepancies.

Cooper's approach manifests much less finesse, and is best characterized as essentially referencing Bernard and saying "yeah, what he said."  What Cooper adds is results of internet or other researches, which at best reveal conclusions that are idiosyncratic, and at worst completely disrespect information clearly presented by others.  His droning about a walking/bicycle path painted on the streets, mentioned in his letter to Soapbox, is a perfect example.  He completely ignores a determination that the streets are too narrow, and that no knowledgable person ever recommended such a thing.  Apart from just saying it, it's not clear Cooper has any idea what people think or want, or how he would possibly know.

The reason to look carefully at Bernard and Cooper is that they each and together present an alleged mandate from the residents, and if these Commissioners could be trusted, the opinions of so many residents should be given substantial weight.  Not necessarily controlling weight, but at least substantial weight.

So thus far, a good opportunity to trust them is mitigated by their presenting arguments that rest on patently untrue assertions, and the fact that the messages they claim to transmit from the public at large cannot be confirmed.  There is no way to tell whether the sheaf of papers Bernard waves around is printed e-mails from resident correspondents, or jokes people sent him.  Assuming they are printed  e-mails at all.

The other source of perspective on Bernard and Cooper, and to what extent they do or don't represent and transmit the voice of the people, is a look at their recent backgrounds in the Village.  Bernard was a well-respected resident of the Park, and he was held in such high esteem that he was made Chairman of the Charter Review Committee, then later appointed unanimously by four sitting Commissioners to fill the spot of the fifth Commissioner, who had just died.  At moments like those, it would have been easy to conclude that Bernard was an agreed representative of community sentiments.  And the recommendations of the Charter Review Committee were accepted both by the then Commission and by the public at large.  Further, Bernard ran for an elected seat when his appointment ended, and he won it.  Again, good reason for confidence in his representing or reflecting something of his neighbors.  But once attaining a Commission seat, Bernard has made himself increasingly marginal.  He quickly alienated three of the four Commissioners who appointed him, and eventually alienated the fourth.  Many votes at the end of the last Commission were 4-1.  On the next Commission, the current one, Cooper joined Bernard, and the two of them represent an almost invariable 3-2 minority, about almost any topic.   On the other side, there is a growing population of Village residents who say they respected and trusted Bernard at one time, but no longer.  So it's no longer clear Bernard represents the voice of anyone except himself, Cooper, and a few residents who will sometimes come forward to echo Bernard's sentiments.

Cooper, for his part, had briefly been active in the Village before his election, having served on one Board (Parks and Parkways) and a related ad hoc committee.  What is notable is that he didn't get along with anyone in either group, and he was most often outvoted or marginalized.  Presumably, when he campaigned for his current Commission seat, he presented himself adequately well in people's homes, and he most likely did not tell them he was an outcast on the two groups where he served.  So it is not really clear that he is a reliable reporter when it comes to the thoughts, or the will, of the people.

What's interesting is the power Bernard once had, and some of which he still retains.  As the dust settles, it is dubious that that power is his ability to transmit, or know, or perhaps even care about, the thoughts, feelings, and voices of the people.  His power is to whip up a form of activity among some of his neighbors.  Even as he has lost increasing numbers of them, those who are devoted can be counted on to ask "how high" when Bernard tells them to jump.  He very effectively gets them to the polls.  He has now stimulated two of his followers to run for Commissioner.  One of them says repeatedly she didn't, or perhaps doesn't, want to run.  The other has lived in the Park for an unspecified, but apparently not very long, time, had been invisible until two months ago, when Bernard suckered him into coming to a Commission meeting to complain both about FPL and the Commission.  He has never had any activity of any kind in the Village, and has never even voted in the Village.  Not for a Village election or even a general election.  So this Commission candidate would normally appear pretty improbable.  But Bernard is a hard and tireless worker, and his devotees do what he tells them. As unlikely as one of Bernard's candidates appears, and as reluctant as the other is, I wouldn't bet against him.  I've seen him in action, and I know what he can do.  I've seen him make a foolish and unbelievably protracted crusade over the planting of one tree, and although he failed to get that one tree planted in two and a half years, and he engendered lots and lots of resentment and frustration from many of us, he never lost the devotion of some of his followers over it.  To this day, they think the saboteur of the tree was someone else.  It wasn't easy to get the Village to decline a new and free tree, but Bernard was provocative, stubborn, offensive, and off-putting enough to get it to happen, and some of his followers still think the culprit was what he likes to portray as the evil ruling triumvirate on the Commission.  He probably blames the Manager as well.   As I recall, he even blames me, although the reasoning is hopelessly tenuous.  And when the County recently expeditiously planted a few blocks of new trees, Bernard complained about that, too, and got his followers completely undone over it.  (See "Dumbing Down" in this blog.)

So when Bernard and Cooper talk, and tell us what should happen about something, because they have inside information as to what our neighbors really think and want, should we believe them?

Heads up.

Well, this is most perplexing.  I have continued to receive requests to remove the "Heads up" post.  The basis is always the same, with one exception.  Everyone who asked me to remove it cited concerns that I was being divisive or inflammatory. Only one person asked me to remove it on the basis that the assertion wasn't true, and that person had no direct reason to know.  No one who is in a position to know has said anything about the post.  What's curious about this is that anyone could say anything he or she wants.  Anyone could assert the rumor wasn't correct, even if it was.  And I haven't even gotten that.

So, as far as I can tell, the rumor is correct.  I believe this to be the case, and I have no reason nor even meaningful suggestion to believe otherwise.  On the other hand, I have no reason to be divisive or inflammatory, and if reasonable people experience the post, or me, that way, then I will conclude the posting made its point, and there is no reason to belabor it.  So I have removed it.

Saw it. Don't completely believe it. Certainly don't get it.

Imagine the final convergence of two great forces.  Or are we about to view the collision of forces?  Let's imagine, at least for purpose of discussion, that Steve Bernard had a theory, and a vision, and he stood for what he tells us incessantly he stands for. And let's summarize that that theory, and that vision, is that the people count, they are the primary entities in our neighborhood, and that the goal of government, here or anywhere, is to see to it that those people are heard, respected, and taken into highest consideration.  I think it's not too far to go to say that Steve feels, or says, the people, when they make their feelings known, should be obeyed.  Government is there to effect the will of the people.  Not the other way around.

So last night, on the Commission agenda, as on the Commission agendas for each of the past very many months, was an item about a change in our Code regarding fences.  This item has been on the Commission's agenda for months for two reasons.  One is that whenever it is actually considered, which it has been from time to time, the Commission sends it back to the Code Review Committee, who are no doubt sick to death dealing with it, to refine it.  Further and repeatedly.  The other reason this item has not been resolved is that the Commission most often does not, in fact, take it up, because the Commission gets bogged down in other nonsense.  We saw a typical, if somewhat bizarre, example last night.  One of the Commission's favorite time wasters is fussing about the minutes.  The Commission ALWAYS wastes inordinate time with this pathetic and frustrating exercise, where that very Steve Bernard will introduce proposed correction after proposed correction, none of which are adopted, and it seems his primary purpose in proposing them (this is essentially what he says) is to draw attention to what he likes to portray as the ethical flaws, and abuse of power, of three of his colleagues.  Last night, same thing.  What made it more bizarre last night was that one of the enemies of the people wasn't there, so every proposal was "defeated" by a mind-numbingly recurrent 2-2 tie.  Furthermore, Steve told us in advance that he wasn't running for re-election next month, and he might not be attending any more Commission meetings at all.  So what was his point?  But whatever it was, it cost us about an hour.

So thanks to Steve, in part, this fence issue has dragged on interminably.  This delay has tested the patience of residents who simply want fences, and it has all but unnerved the CRC, which has recrafted the fence ordinance who knows how many times, often because Steve 1) doesn't like the language, and 2) insists the people must be best represented by the Code.  The CRC, of course, is the people.  It includes members some of whom were appointed by Steve.

Last night.  Drum roll.  Final revision submitted.  CRC Chair personally there to shepherd the presentation.  It don't get better, or more comprehensive, than this in terms of hearing the voice of the people.

Force number two.  As I said, Steve announced at the outset of the meeting that we wouldn't have him to kick around any more.  (Sorry, Dick; Sorry, Pat; Sorry, Checkers)  This was the finale.  The swan song.  The culmination of his opportunity, and his career, as a Commissioner whose one and only stated goal was to elevate the people and their voices.

So in theory (beginning to look like one of Einstein's, where up may be down, and down may be up), Steve thanks the CRC, and the Commission, and the Attorney, and the impatient residents, and he reassures everyone that it was necessary to protract this fence ordinance business, so that the best voice of the people would be developed and heard.  In theory, he votes proudly, perhaps even gloating, to pass this final revision of the fence Code.  Ta-Da!  Sort of a crowning achievement.

You will recall that I said it wasn't completely clear whether we were about to witness a convergence, or a collision.  And if you have any sense at all, you will not read further without donning a crash helmet.

Steve's reception of the new Code was as follows: He felt it didn't really represent the real wishes of the people.  He did not make clear what those real wishes really are, and how he knows.  Maybe it was that standard large collection of mysterious e-mails, sent by anonymous residents, and only to him.  Further, in that we are about to have an election, and at least one Commissioner will be different than the current roster (someone will take over Steve's vacant seat), he somehow decided that the current Commission should not feel authorized to make decisions regarding the fence Code.  He seems to have felt that if even one member of the current Commission is a lame duck, which he is, then the Commission is disqualified from making important decisions.  (He did not, however, recommend cancelling or quickly adjourning the meeting.  Line of thinking unknown.  Possibly not rational anyway.)  And we must remember that it was this lame duck, irrelevant, disqualified Commission that 1) kept sending the iterations of the proposed Code back to the CRC, and that 2) was too irresponsible and ignoring of the needs of the residents to address the reviewed Code in a timely way.  Buck stops where?

So Steve's suggestion, with which my one-time friend Roxy Ross agreed (I'm scolding you, Rox; you're a bad, bad girl.  Mayor, indeed!), was to delay consideration of the Code and let the real representatives of the residents, the next Commission, whoever they are, deal with it.  Would you believe me if I told you there were residents who were dying to get permission to put up fences, and at least two representatives of the CRC, in attendance last night, and none of them was very pleased at this gross abdication of responsibility?  And if you think that Steve seems to be at war with himself, I think you're right.

I give myself the task of trying to explain this behavior.  I won't saying making sense of it, because I don't think there is any sense to it.  But here goes.  And this is all speculation.  1) Maybe Steve is just blindly obstructive, or sabotaging.  Anything to interfere with progress and/or equanimity.  2) Steve is angry at everyone over whatever made him to decide not to run for re-election, so he's punishing everyone.  3) With all his bluster and portrayal of broad knowledge, if not expertise, Steve doesn't trust himself and is really afraid to make decisions, and it's easier for him to interfere with them than to take real leadership in one.  4) Steve sees a no-win situation here, where no matter what, someone will be disappointed, or angry, and he wants someone else, not himself, to take responsibility for it.  5) Steve doesn't really like fences here.  He's sort of said that, and he sort of said it last night.  But the new Code was about allowing them.  So Steve caught himself with his own pants down, and really isn't that interested in what the people want anyway, if it conflicts with what he wants, so he just wanted to run away from the whole matter.  Other than that, I think I'm outta material.

Now Rox.  What's got inta ya, girl, as Frank Zappa said.  I only have three theories, not having spoken with her about it.  1) She was tired of the monotonous 2-2 votes, of which this would surely have been yet another, so why bother?  2) She was tired of fighting with Steve, which is what occupies most of her time, Anderson's time, Childress' time, Ana's time, Maria Camara's time, Charlie Smith's time, and all the rest of our time, and again concluded, why bother?  3) Rox calculated (she said so last night) that if she agreed to set it aside until next month, there would be a one month delay in dealing with it.  (Groan.)  But if it got voted down (2-2 is defeat), there would be a three month delay in being able to reintroduce it.  (Hysterical shrieking!)  So better to delay.  And anyway, there was always 1).

What an unsatisfying evening.  And an affront to everyone who lives here.

Bah! Humbug!

The dirty words used to be making Biscayne Park "A Better Place to Be."  Tonight, we heard about the "Love Fest" held for our Manager.  The term was mentioned by four people, three of them sarcastically and derogatorily, and the fourth referring to the phrase uttered by the other three.  A "Love Fest" is where people present themselves at the special session to consider the Manager's performance and her contract, and they like her.  A lot.  Non-Commissioner residents like her a lot.  Three of five Commissioners like her a lot.  Her coworkers and subordinates like her a lot.  Even the people who were critical of her in any way talked about how likeable and effective she is, but the fact that that is what was said repeatedly rubbed some the wrong way.  So saying you like the Manager and think she does a great job, and saying this in the context of a meeting in which receiving and evaluating feedback about the Manager is the point of the meeting, is a "Love Fest."

But here's the problem.  Every non-Commissioner resident who spoke spoke positively about the Manager.  Even those who had any criticism spoke positively.  And the two Commissioners who were negative about the Manager are negative about everything.  So it seems the conclusion really is that our Manager is that good.  So if she's really that good, and if almost everyone with anything to say says she's that good, then why is telling like it apparently is a "Love Fest?"

Calling tonight's meeting a "Love Fest," or criticizing the Mayor for her ambition to make the Park "A Better Place to Be," isn't an assessment.  It's a posture.  It's a ploy.  It's being a misanthrope.  Pure and simple.  It's what some people do: they make it their business to complain and find fault.  There might be fault to find (as the Manager said, no one is perfect), or there might not, but the self-appointed task for some people is just to grouse.  If there's something to grouse about, they're all over it.  If there isn't, they grouse about nothing.  But they don't say it's about nothing.  Wouldn't they look foolish if they said they were whining because they like to whine.  Or because they're just unhappy and poorly adjusted people.  They twist and distort a matter until they've wrung from it something they think they can portray as a problem worthy of complaint.  Or accusation.  That's become a pretty consistent offering from some people around here.

One Commissioner accused the Manager of not meeting her responsibilities to the neighborhood.  But that Commissioner never comes to any Village events except Commission meetings (of which he misses more than any other Commissioner).  It may be that he doesn't think coming to Village events is his responsibility, but I don't know anyone who agrees with him.  He has also never turned in his Manager evaluation from a year ago.  When he was confronted about that tonight, he said he had completed it, but not submitted it, and that he had "legal advice" that he should not submit the evaluation.  His angle was that he considered the Manager under some kind of investigation, and that somehow that meant he shouldn't turn in the evaluation he claims he did and which was due a year ago.  And tonight, he was one of two Commissioners who advocated strongly that Manager evaluations should be required to be in writing.  You can see how twisted this is.  It's actually tortured.  And it's all about whining and complaining and accusing and being dissatisfied.  But there's no real content.  What is presented as content is ethereal.  All it really is is bad attitude disguised as righteous scrutiny.  Nasty, nasty stuff.  Divisive, ill-tempered, and hypocritical.

And for the record, I completely agree with both Commissioners (Bernard and Cooper) who said they thought evaluations should be written, not just verbal.  But they're both such miserable people that by the time they get done taking swipes at everyone, any feeling of accord with them is gone for me.

So that was our gathering for tonight.  I'm happy to report, though, that when all was said and done, those of us who were in love were still in love.  The "Fest" wasn't spoiled.  The Mayor remarked at the amazing resilience of the Manager.  It came through again, and it buoyed all of us.  She really is a gem.

Dumbing Down

It's Wednesday morning, October 12, and I have to confess I'm writing this under the influence.  Last night, I watched not more than about 5-6 minutes of the lastest Republican debate.  I didn't watch long, but the toxin was strong.  (BTW, I'm not really sure how this was configured as a debate.  The one debating opponent of all the Repbulican participants, Barack Obama, wasn't included.  Sort of a straw man debate, I guess.  That may be part of the toxicity.)  Anyway, the debate happened to be among Republicans, but it wouldn't have mattered if it had been a Democrat debate.  The problem would have been the same.  It's several people working hard never to give serious consideration to anything, avoiding serious questions, and spouting slogans which were intended to earn the applause of the audience.  Which they did, from time to time.  It's an empty, foolish, insubstantial undertaking, and it leaves the viewer wondering which of these mindless and apparently fearful losers will be the party's nominee for President of the United States.

In 2006, someone sent me the following quote: 

"As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)


Much more recently, I stumbled across this quote:

“Palin’s supporters identify with her: she represents the erasure of any distinction between the governing and the governed.” New Yorker, 12/7/09


You can see the theme is the same. 

In its meeting last week, our Commission had an opportunity and a responsibility.  It squandered one, and abdicated the other.  The subject was trees.  A couple of weeks before, arborists (2) from the County had come to talk to us.  They warned about the Australian pines along Griffing Boulevard, and they pointed out the trees were at the end of their lives.  They pointed to signs of death at the tops of the trees, and they suggested the trees should be felled and replaced by other trees.  They suggested oaks, but agreed the County would install whatever we wanted.  So the Commission agreed (3-2, as it agrees to most things), and the trees were taken down.

The problem is that some Griffing residents particularly liked the trees, or they were used to them, and they were sorry to see them go.  Although some of the stumps were all but hollow, demonstrating how right the County arborists had been, some were not yet hollowed by insidious death, and the mourning residents latched onto pictures of those vital-looking stumps, to suggest the trees had been needlessly killed.  Did I say "mourning" and "killed?"  Indeed I did.  Well, it's not so much that I said it.  The unhappy residents themselves said it.  One talked about how the trees had been "murdered" and "killed."  Another talked about how not only she and her husband had been bereft by the loss of the trees, but that even the household pets had been disoriented, off their feed, and otherwise undone by the disappearance of these dear botanical friends.  Two residents, having apparently given up on wishing the trees qua trees were still there, complained that the large stumps should have been left standing, so they could lovingly have been converted into wood sculpture, as is done "in Europe" (photographic show-and-tell included).

Some people are willing to spend heroically to try to salvage ailing pets that are really at the ends of their lives.  Some can't bring themselves to turn off life supports when family members are brain dead and vegetative.  And evidently, some people just can't let go of dead or dying trees.  And this is with apparent complete suspension of recognition that if the trees are that badly off, it may be likely that they will either drop large branches, or fall over altogether, placing property and life at risk.

So this is what confronted the Commission last week.  Now let's remember the Mencken and New Yorker quotes, and the political debate.  These provide a critical frame of reference.  The debates demonstrated that apart from the self-serving effect of pandering, the contestants had an underlying fear of the audience (local and TV).  Contestants could not speak candidly, honestly, and with regard to the question at hand, because they were afraid the audience wouldn't approve.  "Audience," of course, equals potential voters.  So if contestants were afraid of the audience, and Mencken and the New Yorker tell us there is decreasing difference between candidates and the general public, then we should understand that candidates are also afraid of themselves.  Not only can they not be assertive because they fear the public, they can't be assertive because they are, in some sense, the general public, and they know they don't know what they're doing.  And they certainly know the general public doesn't know what it's doing.  Otherwise, they wouldn't jerk the public around as they do.  And if we further understand what Mencken tells us, we have to assume that at some level, the general public, who are not running for office, because they know they don't have the skills and knowledge, are afraid of themselves and their elected officials, as exemplified by the effigies of themselves they just elected.  Or are now considering electing.  In other words, they're in conflict.  They say they don't want a class different from themselves governing, but they know they themselves are not up to the responsibility, and neither are their equals whom they propose to elect.

So back to the Commission and last week.  The Commission had, in theory, a job to do.  It had to sympathize with the complaining public who mourned the loss of their dead trees.  It had to express understanding of the natural and near universal reflex gut reaction.   And it had to reassure the public that the decision was a correct one, that prevented future problems and would provide a better environment for Griffing Boulevard.  It had to remind residents that this project cost the County money, and the County would not have spent that money unless there was a reason to.  And if the County had money it had to spend somewhere, why there?  Why those trees, with the stigmata of impending death on them?  It had to remind residents that two County arborists agreed the trees were not salvageable.  It had to help residents move on.

But the Commission didn't do that.  It didn't do any of it.  Parts of the Commission fanned primitive flames, encouraging residents to feel somehow mistreated by the County.  That part of the Commission enabled and nourished feelings that the County, its arborists, and even the Village, by agreeing to this battery, were enemies of the public.  That part of the Commission cultivated the plaintiffs' feelings of loss, and it never confronted words like "murdered" and "killed" as they apply to taking down dead or near dead trees.  And that part of the Commission whipped up or proposed to legitimize enough primitive fear and anger in some residents that it succeeded in getting one other member of the Commission to agree to spend up to $5000, next time we have to replace dead trees, to hire a "second" (third, in this case) opinion arborist to check to see if the dead or dying trees are really dead or dying.  So the Village, which is operating on something akin to a shoestring, which will now see even lower revenues, which just voted in a mindless, self-destructive, and public-pandering gesture, to lower property taxes, and which already agreed last year to flush $5000 down the toilet because one Commissioner was feeling angry and spiteful, has now agreed (different 3-2 this time) to completely waste up to $5000 next time we need dead trees replaced.  And all of this is a collusion between residents who nurture their primitive impulses, and three Commissioners who are afraid of those residents, and may be nurturing their own primitive and self-serving impusles.

Mencken could really not have said it better.

WTF. The BC Show is at it again.

Unnecessary investigation:  $5000, No problem
Attorneys fees:  $165 an hour for countless unnecessary hours, No problem
Second opinion (well, third) to cut down dead trees:  Up to $5000, No problem

Overdue evaluation of Manager:  $900, instead of $75,  Unimaginable!  What a waste of money!  Would rather delay the overdue than to "waste" $825!  (Having just complained about an overdue auditor's report)

Sanity between two Commissioners: Would be Priceless, but not available.

Just a Curiosity

On the radio this morning, there was a story about a Republican US Congressman whose district includes Joplin, Missouri..  He reportedly aligns himself with the "Tea Party."  The story was about what amounts to hypocrisy.   Joplin was heavily damaged by tornados this year, and the Congressman eagerly accepted, in fact sought, whatever help FEMA could give.  There were even reportedly supportive and heartfelt appearances in the area by Obama and Nancy Pelosi.  Some people in Joplin didn't want the help.  They are far right-wingers, and they reportedly wanted only to help themselves, with no contribution from the Federal government, for which they apparently have disdain.  But the Congressman was more than happy to accept help from FEMA, even though his usual public statements were in the direction of limiting the Federal government and FEMA.

I remember a TV show Michael Moore did about 15 years ago.  It was called "TV Nation," and it was a somewhat provocative investigation show, more or less like his movies.  In one episode, he tracked down Newt Gingrich, to ask him about a sizable Federal expenditure in Gingrich's district.  The expenditure was to construct a large pond or lake, to enhance a private high end housing development.  Gingrich essentially ran away and refused to talk to Moore.

For years, Joe Lieberman called himself a Democrat.  I could never figure out why.   Eventually, he gave it up, and he now calls himself a Republican.  Makes complete sense to me.  Every one of his policies was, as I recall, in line with Republicans.  He really was one.  Now, he admits it.  It's better that way.

So every once in a while, you find someone like that.  Someone who declares him or herself a member of one party, but whose heart is very clearly with the other party.  For example, you might find someone who will, at any moment of any day, say he is a Democrat, and support and vote for Democrats, but who has allergy-level, and certainly Republican-level, mistrust of and disdain for government, and who will react even to the mention of taxes as if they were someone's attempt to swindle him out of his money.  Or as if taxation was more or less like the government's commission of armed robbery.  Such people are sometimes preoccupied with crime and "aliens," and they seem to want to live in a fortress.

As I say, it's a curious thing.  Tip O'Neill was prophetically right.  All politics really are local.  The guy from Missouri and Newt Gingrich can complain all they want about Federal expenditures and even waste, but when it's for their own enrichment, they get much more flexible.  They get "generous with other people's money."  And others can say what they want about the importance of the role of government in supporting the public and infrastructure, but when it's their money that has to pay for it, they're not so sure it's necessary, or at least that there must be some other way to pay for it.  Or some "grant" or other source that will pay, because they want to keep their money.  It seems they're generous, too, but only if the money is someone else's.

The fact is, of course, that most people who call themselves adherents of one party or another are essentially honest about it.  They declare a party affiliation, because they agree with the philosophies and positions of that party.  But some people are either confused or hypocrites.  For whatever reasons, they claim affiliation with one major party, but their real personal instincts and ethics are much better aligned with the other party.  Too bad they either don't get it, or they're not honest enough to call themselves what they are.

Gimme a Break!

What an awful hearing I'm slogging through today.  The attorney is the most miserable I ever have to deal with.  He's in Queens, New York.  I probably shouldn't say his name.  I've dealt with him on many occasions, and he is essentially a terrorist when it comes to hearings.  I've seen him bring hearings and judges to their knees.  He's doing it again.  How he thinks this serves his clients' interests is beyond me.  I can imagine that a judge might be tempted to find against his client, just because they can't stand him. 

He constantly interrupts those testifying, the judges, and the experts.  He is rude and hostile, and he challenges everything.  Everything!  He accuses judges and medical experts of being biased.  He even writes about this, and his flailings can be found on line.  He raises his voice during hearings, talks over people, and seems devoted to derailing the hearings.  It is not infrequent that judges will tell him he has to control himself, or they will suspend and have to reschedule the hearings.  Hearings with him take significantly longer than with other attorneys, because he won't stay on track and/or shut up.  Attorneys in New York are peculiarly uninhibited and combative, but this guy takes the cake.

Today, he stopped a hearing for a while, asserting that perhaps the recording might not be working.  While this was being investigated, he took another swipe at the judge, noting that he recalled another time the recording failed "conveniently" at a time the judge "wanted the case to go away."  As it turns out, the recording was working fine.  It appears he invented his concern, to keep the hearing off balance.  And never mind the vile accusation of the judge.

He's also an avid letter-writer to higher authorities.  He has turned in judges for accusations of bias, and he once wrote to a judge to request that the judge surrender me to the Attorney General's Office for criminal investigation, based on his conclusion that I lied about something.  Five of the judges in that office are being sued for bias. It appears this attorney is behind it. 

This attorney is clearly a very disturbed person.  He is belligerent, uncivilized, and seems to me to be almost paranoid.  He is completely unmanageable in a hearing.  And the funny thing is I met him once.  I went to NY to do hearings, and he was one of the attorneys.  He dresses well and looks normal.  Apparently, he's very intelligent.  He got his BS in Psychology from UVA, Magna Cum Laude, and his law degree from Penn.  If he didn't open his mouth, you'd never know how grossly dysfunctional he is.

I know, this blog is supposed to be about BP, and I'm ventilating about a problem hearing in NY.  What's the hearing got to do with BP?  Yes, I suppose you're right.  This hearing is just a real and crushing drag.  I'm stuck in the middle of it, and it's on my mind.


PS: The hearing is over.  Hearings take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, with the occasional hearing taking an hour and a half.  This one took just under four hours.  What a waste of time and life.  Though I'm sure the attorney would say he was only pursuing adequate advocacy for his client.  He has not the slightest sense of proportion, and not much reality-testing, either.

What? We're Not Good Enough?

I wasn't expecting to submit a travelogue, but maybe it's not a bad idea.  My most recent trip was to Kansas City and San Diego.  Before that, it was Massachusetts, mostly the Berkshire towns in western Massachusetts.  Last year, I was in Asheville NC.  So what do all these places have in common?  And why am I wasting your time telling you about them?  They all have public art programs, mainly public sculpture.  I bring them up, because they're sort of informal, as these things go.  Boston has public sculpture.  So does NYC.  In fact, so does Miami Beach.  And San Francisco.  But these are more upscale programs, in a way.  Lots of money spent, for juried or commissioned pieces. 

Kansas City has loads of public sculpture.  It's really quite surprising, and it exists throughout the city and even in neighboring municipalities.  Much of it was donated by private wealthy people.  The bigger and better pieces are wonderful.  But there are also very many pieces which are frankly modest in themselves.  Some of them are not much different from some of the garden statuary you can find at various locations in Miami.  But given a bit of care about placement and surrounding shrubbery, even these pieces look impressive.  Not always for what they are per se, but for the fact that they're there.  They're like the difference between a blank wall in your home and a wall with a picture on it.  Do you have any pictures on your walls at home?  Did you pay thousands or many thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for them at a prestigious art gallery or a high end auction?  No?  Oh, they're just pictures you happen to like, maybe even inexpensive reproductions or posters, and you like a bit of decor in your home?  Right, some public art is just like that.  There's lots like that in KC and environs.  And bigger and more impressive pieces, too.  I'm told KC has the second most fountains of any city in the world.  Rome has more.  Almost everywhere you look, there's something interesting.  And beautiful.  And the people of KC like it that way.

San Diego has less, but it's effective.  There's one strip of sculptures along the wharf.  No high art at all, but each piece interesting.  And the aggregate is even better than the interesting pieces.  Other pieces are scattered at various places in the city.  There doesn't seem to be a concerted and pervasive plan, like there is in KC, but they certainly make their point.

Asheville is quite interesting.  It's a relatively small and funky venue, and you sort of stumble onto things.  The public outdoor sculpture in Asheville is distinctly funky.  It's humorous and often unexpected.  There's a real sense of playfulness about Asheville's sculpture.  And there's more of it than you would think there would be in a town like that.

Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is a depressed city.  They lost a huge employer in General Electric, and they never quite recovered.  They seem to be working on it.  They like their summer outdoor festivals, and they have overflow from the toney Berkshire crowd, but Pittsfield itself is distinctly blue collar, at best.  High unemployment.  So what on earth are they doing with so many pieces of outdoor public sculpture?  Again, no high art.  Just weird, sometimes funky, curious stuff, and it isn't all the same from one year to the next.  You really want to drive through the center of downtown, just to see what they have this year.  And you can't fully believe they take themselves that seriously.  Or have quite that much pride.  But apparently, they do.

And these are not the only places you find public art.  We have some here.  You know those huge fiberglass chickens that are painted in various ways?  There's at least one on SW 8th Street.  And other places.  What, that's not public art?  Says who?  Of course it is.  In the Berkshire towns, it's cows like that.  And someplace else, I saw the same phenomenon, only sheep.  OK, so it's not "high art."  And your point is?  It's diversity.  It's intrigue.  It's a kind of drama.  Or it's cute, or funny, or charming.  And it's interesting and engaging.  It makes you want to look around, maybe wonder what's down the next street.  It makes you think about the people.  They like themselves, and the place they live.  They have a special pride.  They want life in their lives.

Now I couldn't prove this, it's just my impression, but it seems to me art like this adds real value to a place, too.  Would I say to you that it specifically increases "property values?"  No, I couldn't do that.  I don't know if it does, or if anyone tried to study the question.  But I will tell you that my reaction to the areas that want to feature public art is that they seem to have a special "value."

Right now, we in BP are sort of suffering a bit.  Some of it is our own fault, and some isn't.  The part that's not our fault is the foreclosures and bank-owned properties.  No one even cuts the grass, and these properties are hurting.  My own sense, and listening to what others say at Commission meetings and elsewhere, is that they're hurting all of us.  What is our own fault is decrepit lawns, paint and other maintenance that isn't done, and miserable medians.  I was on Planning and Zoning for a few years, and it's very clear to me that the policy-makers, and the enforcers, do not want to live in a run down environment.  Neither do I.  If anything, they want the Codes strengthened, and they want them enforced.  We want to step it up, and have a neighborhood that pleases us and that we can be proud of.

We have a piece of public sculpture of our own.  It's in "Griffing Park," just across 6th Avenue from the log cabin.  But we're not limited to one sculpture.  We could have as many as we want.  As long as we're interested and willing to provide them for ourselves.  We could have frequently occurring smaller concrete pieces, on every median, if we want, and/or we can have more attention-grabbing pieces, in large medians or any of our public places.  All we need is interest, a certain amount of money, and a commitment from the Village to make the spaces available.

Have I sparked anyone's interest?  I want to know about it if I have.  I'm more than happy to help find pieces, collect money, and get us stuff.  Or, the Foundation, if it raises enough money on a reliable and recurring basis, may want to begin a program of acquisition of public sculpture for us.  Also, if we don't have enough money, many sculptors who make large and expensive pieces, will rent those pieces, usually for 10% of the purchase price per year.  You can lease a piece for a year or two or so, then let it go and get something else.  Or if we really liked something we leased, we could just finish paying for it and keep it.

So lemme know what you think.

Bada-Bing

Steve Bernard and I do not speak to each other.  My best guess is that given an adequate opportunity, we might well not even like each other.  This will come as a kind of surprise after the Commission meeting last night, where we seemed so well coordinated, as if we had been planning and rehearsing a show.  It was, in its way, a bit like professional wrestling, where we seem to fight, but we are really acting a very carefully choreographed demonstration.  So what did we demonstrate last night?

There was the build-up, of course.  The pre-banter and the mutual dissing.  Played out to the public over days, weeks, and months.  Last night, we started with me for the evening's show.  I gave my little speech, which I had written the week before and circulated, including to my partner, Commissioner Bernard.  This works better if he knows what I'm going to say.  So I said he was rigid, stubborn, contrary, disruptive, and uncooperative.  It's the typical material he and I use.  We find it works well for us.  I said he would complain that he didn't have a fair chance to digest the budget, had too many unanswered questions, felt unaccommodated, was generally immature in his approach, and would ultimately vote against the budget.  I threw in his junior partner as well, and Steve and I have come to have excellent confidence that the lad won't disappoint.  So that was the set-up.

Then, it was my partner's turn.  I only get three minutes, and he gets all night (mercifully shortened this time to 10 crushing minutes), so I think we can safely call his part of the demonstration the Steve Bernard Show, starring......Steve......Bernard!  So he picks up his cues and explains that of course he has a million questions.  He's already asked them, he admits, but they went unanswered.  So he still has them.  (We now make reference to what each other says, for thematic continuity and comic timing.  Never mind; believe me, it works well.)  So where I accuse him of getting ready to complain that he's been cheated out of time to study the budget and get answers to his questions, he then complains that he's been cheated out of time to study the budget and get answers to his questions.  (We're trying to develop a variation where he blames me for the deprivation, but we haven't been able to come up with a mechanism.  Yet.)

We had a few missteps last night, and we have to work them out.  They were untidy.  One was where I say he's had two months to study the budget and ask all his questions privately of the Manager and Finance Director.  Well, the fact is he really didn't bother to discuss any of this with them, and I'm afraid he may have come out looking badly on this one.  This is not good for the act.  Also, he invokes the public interest and desire to know about the budget, and I clumsily pointed out that essentially no one came to the public workshops.  In the past, he's whined that there wasn't adequate notification, people didn't know, the recording system wasn't working, or some other irrelevant or nonsensical tangent.  But he sort of surrendered last night to my assertion that actually no one cares, and he's just talking to himself.  We'll try to compose a better comeback for him next time.

So Steve continues on.  The million questions, asked with hostile attitude; the undercurrent accusations and complaints of managerial misbehavior and incompetence; the references to inept and gullible colleagues; the disdain for the appalling lack of rigor in the entire pathetic system.  Steve can do this in his sleep.  He probably does.  But it's not just content, which is beginning to get dangerously trite for him.  He has a stage show to perform.  After all, there are the imagined peeps out there.  The fantasied adoring audience.  The hypothetical beneficiaries of the pitbull advocacy he delivers.  These aren't lines you simply read.  You have to act them out.  Out comes the interrupting, the badgering, the hectoring, and those trademark smirks.  And the spitballs.  Tom Cruise and Denzel have their mulitmillion dollar smiles.  Our Steve has his spitballs.  He nearly unnerved Roxy, and he threw Bob Anderson completely off track.  Bob had to give up in disgust, having admittedly lost his train of thought.  What a barrage.  Better than Fourth of July fireworks.  Al Childress was too far away, and he contented himself simply with telling Steve he had the floor.  Yawn.

Then, we approach the end.  Now I have to set this up right.  It's way too good to mischaracterize.  And I have an admission to make.  I said far in advance, and in my preparatory words last night, that the Commission would pass the budget 3-2.  I know: duh.  But one of my friends bet me a bottle of scotch it would pass 4-1.  What?!! 4-1?!!  Who, I asked incredulously, is going to flinch?  Cooper, said my friend.  Nah, you're out of your mind.  Cooper won't flinch.  Cooper, "Dr No," doesn't even know what's going on.  He has no reason to flinch.  But no, my friend wouldn't flinch, either.  He really thought he was getting a bottle off me.  So here's where it gets good.  Each Commissioner had his or her say, and a chance to make suggestions for the budget.  My Steve started.  Then it was Childress.  Eventually, it was Cooper's turn.  At some point, he let slip that he "couldn't vote for this budget because..." and I turned and gave my friend a smirk of my own.  Now in the meantime, I'm actually getting worried.  My Steve asked all his questions, and made many suggestions.  But Roxy, who I thought was a friend, starts making sure Steve gets answers to his questions, and worse, she starts engineering that each of his requests is satisfied.  Come on, Rox, I have a bottle of scotch riding on this.  My friend didn't say the bet was about Cooper.  He said it was about the vote.  If it's any 4-1, I lose!  And my so-called friend Roxy Ross is explicitly and completely openly trying to get Steve to find agreement with the budget.  So he'll vote for it!!  She said so!!  You know how the car salesmen ask what they have to do to get you buy the car right now?  Yeah, it was like that.  Rox!!  How can you do this to me?  So Steve gets everything he wants.  All questions answered.  All requests accommodated.  I'm sunk. 

The vote gets taken, and it's..............3-2.  Ahhhh.  That's my boy.  You can give him absolutely everything he wants, and he still won't be satisfied.  The funny thing is, that's exactly what I said in my opening speech, but I forgot.  I got a little panicked over the scotch, and I forgot the deal.  This is Steve Bernard we're talking about here.  It wasn't about the budget.  It was just about rebelling.

So now, my friend can go buy me a bottle of Glenrothes, and everything will be right with the world.  Thanks, partner.

Good Help is So Hard to Find

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?

Whew! In a twisted sort of way.

At the Commission meeting last night, we concluded a critical phase of budget deciding.  We established a maximum rate to charge for property tax against assessed property value.  This is called the TRIM.  We can set any rate we want, from nothing to 10 mills.  A mill is worth one thousandth of the assessed value of a real property.  So if we charge 5 mills of assessed value (assessed value minus homestead exemption), a net $300K property will have a bill of $1500.  If we charge 10 mills, it's $3000.  For the rest of this discussion, there are four numbers to keep in mind: 10, 9.2661, 8.9933, and 8.90.  Three of them have some sort of identifiable rationale, and the other has no meaning whatsoever.  We'll come to that.

The Village has had some tough times in recent years, as have all municipalities.  There have been foreclosures, which produce no property tax, and general devaluation, which means that the assessed values have dropped, for no reality-based reason, and therefore so has the tax.  In addition, the homestead exemption, which is an amount that is not subjected to taxation, was doubled.  So the Village has three sources of revenue loss.  There is one kind of property that has not only not produced less tax, it has produced more tax than the year before.  These are properties that were purchased sufficiently long ago, at low enough price, with homestead exemption in place, so that the tax owed in a market of rising real estate values soon enough was under the standard for like-market value properties.  Just to illustrate this, if someone bought a property for $100K years ago, and fixed the tax rate through homestead exemption, and through increasing real estate values, that property is now worth $350, the tax paid is based on the original purchase price, not the current market value.  If the homeowner sells the house for $350K, the new owner will pay a much higher property tax, for the exact same property.  The implication for the Village, and for the homeowner with the longstanding homestead exemption is that the Village collects only the tax the homeowner is required to pay, which is inadequate, and the homeowner's tax can increase every year, but only by 3%.  So those homeowners will experience a tax increase even when assessments are falling and homestead exemptions are doubling, because they're so far behind real value.

This, then, is what the Commission and the Manager confronted when they had to agree to a TRIM.  The question for Commissioners was what is the maximum possible property tax they should consider assessing.  Obviously, this depended in part on how much they all thought the Village would need, which is a guess.  Other factors included what anyone thought would happen to assessments and the rate of foreclosures, which is also a guess, and what kind of number, in terms of the sound of the number, they wanted to pick.  This is not a rational factor, but it's there.

Now before we go further with this discussion, we need to keep something in mind.  It's sort of critical to deciding how to approach the matter of the TRIM.  The Village of Biscayne Park is an unusual, if not almost unique, place.  We have fewer and more limited sources of revenue than most places do.  We have no businesses, no industry,  and no opportunity to assess tolls on people.  We're on our own.  The clearest demonstration of this fact is that we derive 5/6 of our entire revenue by charging ourselves.  Half of the Village's revenue comes from the property tax, and an additional third comes from utility Franchise Fees.  All of this is just our money, which we give to ourselves.  Another illustration of our special character, and the fact that we know it, like it, and prefer it that way, came also from last night's Commission meeting.  The matter of fences was discussed, especially the prospect of fences in front yards.  Almost no one favored the idea.  Almost every resident who spoke expressed a fondness for a quaint, open, charming neighborhood, different from nearby neighborhoods or even from any neighborhoods.  So the bottom line is we have to fend for ourselves if we like ourselves the way we are, and we want to keep us that way.

Fifteen or 16 months ago, we made a decision.  We signed a Franchise Agreement with FPL.  This was a major bullet we dodged.   Had we not signed, FPL would not have collected the Franchise Fee, which it returns to us, accounting for part of that third of our revenue.  To make matters worse, the County would have collected the Fee from us anyway, and there is a reasonable likelihood it would not have returned the money to us.  This would have cost us about $120K per year in Village revenue.  Those who agitated not to sign the Agreement (amazingly, there were such people) suggested we could capture the revenue in some other way, leaving us to pay the amount twice, instead of once, but no other legitimate and reliable method was offered.  So more rational heads prevailed, and a bullet was dodged.

Last night, we were not quite so lucky.  We caught a bullet.  The wound was not fatal, but it will be damaging.  Recall those four numbers.  Our currect millage is 8.9933 mills.  This has produced a certain level of revenue for the past year, but at the same millage rate, the revenue goes down, because more devaluation has occurred in the past year.  An alternate proposal was to charge ourselves at the rate of 9.2661 mills, which takes a higher percentage of a lower valuation and results in the same tax bill for homeowners and the same revenue we had this past year.  Yet another proposal was based on the understanding that the TRIM is a maximum possible tax, which can be lowered after further exploration if necessary, and is respecful of the fact that the budget is only a guess anyway.  So the suggestion was to declare the highest TRIM allowable, at 10 mills, and this could be lowered if we found on closer inspection of the budget that we could get along on less.  And the TRIM, for statutory reasons, can be lowered after it's set, but it can't be raised.

So these three suggestions had an at least loose rationale.  One represents the rate we've been living with, even though the tax decreases because assessed values have decreased.  Another represents an adjustment that allows the Village to receive the same revenue it lived on last year.  This doesn't take into account that things tend to get more expensive over time, but there's an at least loose theory to attach to.  The last proposal was in many ways the most sensible.  Since we can always lower the final agreed tax rate from whatever the TRIM guess was, since we haven't scrutinized the budget, and since we've already had to take money from the reserve, why not set the TRIM as high as we can?  Each of these, then, has a kind of meaning and logic.

The one proposal that had no meaning, no logic, and disrespected the rising costs of things, the Manager's efforts to date to economize, the fact that we have frozen many wages in the Village, and the fact that we have already invaded the reserve, was the proposal to set the TRIM, the highest possible tax rate, at 8.90.  This is below what it is now, which itself pinches us further than we have been pinched already.  And the number was completely arbitrary and was intended to apply irrevocable pressure on the Manager, all Village employees, and the Village as a collection of residents.  Had that TRIM been accepted, the injury would have affected vital organs.  The Commission had enough wisdom not to shoot itself, and the rest of us, quite that directly.  It did not, however, have enough wisdom to do the patently sensible thing, and adopt the 10 mill TRIM, or even the revenue-neutral thing, and adopt 9.2661.  So we're left with 8.9933, which is less this year than it was last year, which prevents us from giving appropriate raises to all of our employees, which does not allow us to keep our facilities in top condition, which does not allow us to make improvements most of us agree need to be made, and which causes us to relieve fiscal pressure at the expense of the reserve.

So not a great night for our Commission.  Why the "whew?"  It could have been worse.  We could have made a suicide attempt last year, and foregone the FPL Franchise Fee, and we could have finished the job by adopting a completely irrational TRIM last night.  So "whew!"  Sad, huh?