I made a heroic effort to be nice in my review of the final budget hearing ("Penny Wise and Pound Foolish"). I hope that at least I accomplished that goal. In the interest of being nice, there were some parts of the story I didn't tell. I felt they weren't "nice."
The meeting went as I said it did, and the conclusions were as I indicated. What I didn't say is this: during the first public comment opportunity, I addressed reasons why I believed the TRIM should be as high as we could make it this year, which was 9.5 mills. I talked long. Then, I talked some more. I ignored about three series of alarms from the timer. And to make matters worse, I addressed the matter of the Administrative Assistant to the Manager, a new position which has already earned the disapproval of some on the Commission. I pointed out that among reasons the Manager needed an Administrative Assistant were that the Clerk, who normally assists the Manager, has been made excessively busy trying to guess what Commissioners want in the minutes. She has wasted many hours of her time on this foolish and irrelevant exercise. In addition, one of the new responsibilities of our new Administrative Assistant is to find and apply for grants. I didn't name Commissioner Cooper, but I said one Commissioner ran on a platform that included an offer to find and write precisely these grants, but he had withdrawn the offer when the last Commission made one vote he didn't like. So we now have to hire someone to do what Cooper refuses to do in general support of the Village. Frankly, I suggested Cooper should resign, since he has nothing to offer the Village. At least nothing it wants and can use.
This was all more than too much for our Mayor, Emperor Jacobs, and he began to try to cut me off. I would not, sadly, shut up, but I reassured him that the Police Chief was in attendance and carrying both a gun and a Taser, and should be more than capable of dispatching me when His Highness had enough. It was then that President Jacobs instructed the Chief to escort me from the room, which the Chief had no choice but to move to do. Since I would never do that to our Chief, I stopped talking and went back to my seat.
The Fuhrer made a couple of references in passing about me and my terrible behavior, which included talking too much and addressing a matter which the Chairman considered both not on topic and ad hominem. Well, I would have let the matter go, but His Imperial Majesty goaded me too much, so at the next public comment opportunity, I told him I was sorry my first appearance of the evening provoked him, but that I suspected he would feel vastly better about me and my behavior if I could show him video clips of his own grossly uncivilized ravings, including threats to the then Mayor and accosting the Village Manager, last summer, or his attempt a few months ago to talk over and suppress Commissioner Ross, who was trying to address a topic during her turn at a Commission meeting. I then suggested to him that he seemed to be setting up a dictatorship, and that as part of it, he wanted to determine what people were allowed to speak. Who would think that at the end of the meeting, at a time I could no longer respond to his other garbage, Cooper would agree with me? But he did.
So that's "the rest of the story." I still say the conclusion, represented by the votes taken, was pleasing.
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