I Couldn't Think of a Title For This One. August Commission Meeting.

I considered "Rules? We Make Our Own!"  Or "Arguments You Could Make in Your Sleep.  Or If You Were Brain Dead."  I didn't really love either title.  I'll tell you what happened, and you can let me know what title would work.

The meeting started 15 minutes late.  From where I sat, it appeared Noah didn't want to start until Barbara and Bryan got there.  They were late.  Maybe neither of them cared much about the Boy Scouts presentation, which never happened anyway, but you would think both would have had the courtesy and the decency to be there for the goodbye-to-Ana-Garcia presentation.  Barbara did eventually show up. Bryan was late enough to miss the whole Ana send-off.  Which frankly I'm guessing was more than OK with Ana.  It was certainly more than OK with the rest of us.  The less of Bryan, the better.  As we learned once he got there.

During initial public comments, Barbara, mainly, and Noah got raked over the coals by most of us who spoke.  Barbara's major gaffe was the hysterics into which she entered over the attempted elimination of some dead trees (more later).  Noah took ongoing heat over his twisted synthesis of the July meetings.  (See the "Contortionists..." post from last week.)  He also gets remarkably creative regarding the rules we supposedly have, compliments of our Code and County and State statutes.  Hence, imagined title #1.

An early topic tonight was the ad hoc resident group that will preview applications for the manager position.  Bryan, who rarely joins the rational world, suggested that the Commission should consider not only the applicants best liked by the ad hoc resident group, but also the applicants who were declared unqualified according to the requirements set forth by the Commission.  He never adequately explained why he wanted to consider unqualified applicants.  Unless he was being purely and reflexly contrary, and wanted nothing but to argue and find a direction that was other than where everyone else was going.  Come to think about it, Bryan had quite an evening.  He broadly accused Board members of being "Mafia" and doing illegal things, like illegally removing trees, and at one point, he admitted that he thinks he knows more about the law than our attorney.  He also revealed that he knows more about botany than an arborist, more about zoology than anyone, and he insisted upon reviewing a contract between the Village and our tree surgeons.  Apparently, he is more astute than our attorney and the Village management.  At least that's what he told us.  At least about contracts.  He got into shouting matches with a few of us, and he provoked the mild-mannered and soft-spoken Bob Anderson until Bob turned to him and yelled something that I probably shouldn't print.  Gary Kuhl was itching for the fight Bryan promised, but Bryan went back into hiding before he had to stand up to the person he was taunting.

By and large, though, Noah, Bryan, and Barbara Watts regressed into their standard disagreeable postures, offering arguments that were meaningless, off topic, and gratuitous, intended only to fill a bit of space before "no" votes.  Hence, imagined title #2.

I'll give you an example.  All three of them ran on a platform that included dire complaints about the minutes.  Minutes were inaccurate; they were incomplete; they were a betrayal of the archive they were supposed to comprise.  As you may remember, once Jacobs/Cooper/Watts were elected, they passed all minutes-- those faulty, incomplete, and corrupted minutes-- without amendment, and instead insisted on "expanded minutes," to give a more complete sense of the proceedings.  Well, it turned out these expanded minutes were a bit complicated, because they took a great deal of the clerk's time, and the audio was hard to hear.  So they themselves were inaccurate.  You remember inaccurate minutes; they were the huge problem, the big crime?  Not to our new majority.  All just fine.  Tonight, for example, Roxy Ross pointed out that the minutes of the June 4th meeting contained a reference to something that was said to have occurred on June 23rd, 19 days later.  No, the Jacobs/Cooper/Watts majority couldn't see what about that was so inaccurate that it ought to be changed.  The word "hypocrisy" was mentioned.   And if that wasn't clear enough, when Roxy suggested that since the clerk was now about to take on added responsibility, and be the interim manager as well as the clerk, we should lighten her load and go back to "action minutes," which take much less time, the majority said no.  You see what I mean?  Purely contrary and rigid.  Not rational.

Here's another example.  Barbara Watts had heard some Australian Pines were being cut down.  This was last Friday.  She hied it over to the site of the massacre, and she took it upon herself to cease the carnage. She, and Bryan, complained that living, or at least wonderful, trees were being killed, and she wanted the 13 foot stumps left in place, to be carved in some imagined artistic way.  She just didn't want those trees cut, and the wood simply turned to mulch.  But one of her suggestions was that it could be cut for yard decoration, or to be sliced into table tops.  So it appears she didn't really object to taking the trees down after all.  And she and Bryan got into a campaign of adoration for the majestic Australian Pine, which the County considers a "pest" that should be eliminated, and they both advocated for the trees to be left as homes for birds.  Or something.  Gary tried to tell them it doesn't work like that with Australian Pines, but they weren't listening.  Think asleep.  Or brain dead.

Barbara also couldn't understand, or maybe she just couldn't admit, that when work like this tree-removal is being done, and a Commissioner steps in and unilaterally interferes, it's a Charter violation.  And I have to say, this went on so long, with Barbara's being so intransigent in the posture she adopted, that it really wasn't clear whether she didn't understand what she did wrong, or she was just reacting like a stubborn and embarrassed child.

Noah showed us all something tonight, though, after his standard rounds of partisan obstinacy.  He's had this crusade lately, to change the system under which Ordinances are evolved.  But after he argued with several people tonight, he finally came to understand that his proposal was irrelevant and added nothing to what we've already always done.  So he actually backed off.  And later, although he argued against accepting the sculpture offered, he voted to accept it.  He found his way to the mature and adaptive version of a 3-2 vote.   He was able to do the same thing, also after a phase of resistance, regarding allowing the Village to proceed with removing the 13 foot Australian Pine stumps.  Well, good for him.

So what do you think about a title?  Should I go with something like "A Silk Purse From a Sow's Ear?"  It wasn't quite that satisfying, or reassuring, but there was a sense of mild surprise and relief from Noah.  I'm taking suggestions.  Leave 'em in the Comments.