Who's on First? A Little History Lesson.

The last post, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?...," led to a small discussion with one of my friends.  He commented about the goings-on at the Commission meeting, which he only knows from reading this blog.  I suggested, as I always do, that he come to meetings, even from time to time.  He replied that he used to, which is why he doesn't come any more.  I asked which meetings, and which Commission(s), turned him off and turned him away, and he said it was the change of the Commission before the current, when Roxy Ross became Mayor, and there was what he called a "free-for-all."  That was my guess.

As I said at the beginning of the "Who Knows..." post, Commission meetings were not always as they are now.  Commissioners receive agenda packets in advance of the meetings, and those packets contain all applicable "back-up" regarding issues to be discussed.  Village staff, including the Manager, are available to confer with Commissioners before the meeting.  What could happen, what is supposed to happen, and what used to happen is that Commissioners would come to the meetings prepared, there might be a small amount of discussion, if there were areas that had not been made clear or which Commissioners felt needed some discussion or public airing, and a vote would be taken.  This process is why meetings used to deal with a full complement of agenda items in under 2 1/2 hours.

Then, Steve Bernard was appointed to the Commission, to fill the seat vacated by Ted Walker.  To rehash for a moment, Steve was appointed unanimously by the remaining four Commissioners.  He became argumentative, challenging, and obstructive, and he almost immediately alienated three of the four Commissioners who appointed him.  By the end of his partial term, he had alienated the last Commissioner who was still making an attempt to tolerate him.  Then, Steve got himself elected.  For two years, he was a solitary thorn in the side of the Commission.  He was impossible to deal with, and he protracted meetings.  They were no longer over in 2 to 2 1/2 hours.  Two years after he got elected, he helped his friend Bryan Cooper get elected, and Commission meetings essentially ground to a halt.  It was not only Steve's crushing and sabotaging personal style, in which he reflexly opposed everything, and accused everyone of incompetence and bad intent, and the fact that his friend Bryan was on precisely the same page.  There was another dynamic, too.  Steve knew he was responsible for Bryan's having gotten elected, and he thought he had contributed to Roxy Ross' election as well.  So he imagined, told himself, and apparently told a number of other people that at Bryan's and Roxy's installation on the Commission, an anointment would occur, and he would be named Mayor, or King, or whatever he fantasized for himself.  What he didn't take into account was Roxy's independence.  She did not vote for him to be Mayor, she was elected Mayor herself, and Steve, and his little pal, went on a relentless campaign, a rampage, to undermine, or sometimes just unnerve, Roxy.  This was the "free-for-all."  They did all they possibly could, including terrorizing the rest of the Commission, the public/audience, and engineering meetings which could never possibly have ended in a respectable amount of time.  In fact, this became a game they played, wasting unspeakable amounts of time, then accusing the rest of the Commission and the Village Manager of sacrificing good government (boy, was that remote from their interest) in favor of expediency, when Roxy, or anyone, tried to keep them on topic.  No longer were Commission meetings manageable, in terms of time or anything else, and a statutory limit of 11:00 was placed on them, so they wouldn't go on all night.  As I said in "Who Knows..." once you liberate yourself from any requirement to say anything of relevance or value, there is no limit to how long you can talk.  And they did.

If you think I'm making this up, please feel free to get the recordings of those old meetings.  The way Steve and Bryan carried on, the way they operated either as a tag team or in concert to distract, disturb, and frustrate Roxy, was disgusting.  And the contempt they showed Roxy was really a contempt for all of us.  Try listening to one meeting.  If you don't want to, or you can't, you know why my friend quit attending.

For reasons which are largely unknown, Steve did not run again.  Instead, he promoted Noah Jacobs, who has no agenda of his own and no connection to Biscayne Park, except it happens to be where he currently rents a place to live.  Noah, for reasons of his own personal style, as well as an instinct to do more or less what Steve tells him, has latched onto the same twisted philosophies about government, his supposed colleagues, and Village staff, and he, too, protracts discussions with elaboration of non-material, and a clear delight in listening to himself talk.

So my friend entered and quickly exited at the time of disruption and trouble, when Steve was an unhappy Commissioner, became an enraged and frustrated aborted pretender to the Mayor's seat, and cultivated a similarly sabotaging and materially irrelevant partner.  Steve has parlayed that minority into a majority, although it no longer includes him, and all of this has conspired to create meetings that are too long, too empty, too combative, and of decreasing tolerability to the residents of Biscayne Park.

For the record, Steve will say, and has said, that our audience dwindled because of some other collection of Commissioners.  He doesn't like to recognize that his increasing presence and influence on the Commission coincided exactly with the drop in resident attendance.  History will not support his fantasies.