Why Such a Hard-On Over the Manager's Authority?

Tracy Truppman has been showing the Village an escalating, almost frantic, campaign.  She focuses, she distorts, she seems bent on cornering, for a kill.  She seems increasingly clearly to want Sharon Ragoonan out.  As best anyone can tell at this point, this is Tracy's private war.

It's been only a very short time since the new Commission and the new Mayor have taken over, and there seems to be a direction.  In various respects, that direction has been to commandeer various of the responsibilities and prerogatives of the Manager.  And most of this seems to be Tracy Truppman's agenda.  The question is, what's all this about, and why is Tracy so intent on invading the Charter-granted space of the Manager?

To remind, the Manager's authority and responsibility were devised by a Charter Review Committee back in 2005.  That proposal was immediately ratified by the then Commission, and a general vote of the Village residents by referendum later that year confirmed the arrangement.  Subsequently, three years ago, another Charter Review Committee, stimulated, funny enough, by the then preceding Commission, which also resented the powers of the Manager (among other things), took a look, and they couldn't find one thing to recommend changing.  For what it's worth, one of our new Commissioners, Jenny Johnson-Sardella, was a member of that Committee.  As an aside, Tracy Truppman, who has never been one bit shy about letting everyone know what she thought about everything, never questioned the authority of the Manager.  So we're back to our question: why does she so adamantly question it now?

Last year, our Manager resigned, and we had to find a new one.  We posted the opening in the usual way, and we got between 50 and 60 applications.  The first step, since we advertised requirements for application, was for the Village Clerk to go through those applications, and remove the ones that did not meet the minimum criteria.  There was no issue as to what qualities or assets the applicants had.  That would be for another level of discrimination.  This was simply whether the applicant had the minimal background requirements we said we demanded.

For who knows what reasons, and despite equivocation as to whether she would or she wouldn't, Tracy Truppman applied for this job.  She was in no way qualified, and half the time, she either said she wouldn't really apply, or she didn't really want the job, but apply she did.  And very predictably, she was eliminated instantly.  Never mind the gross lapse in judgment to think she was worthy of consideration, despite not being remotely qualified, or offering to be the Manager of a municipality in which she lived.  No, she simply did not in any way deserve consideration, because she has no relevant training or experience.  But still...

It's also worth noting something about how Tracy deals with people.  From time to time, Commissioners (and others, I'm told) would get calls from Tracy.  The calls would always start with "I need five minutes of your time."  This meant that with some work on the part of the recipient of the call, it might be possible to end the call in about 30 minutes.  You had to fight Tracy a bit to get her to let you go, but it could be done.  The content of the call was some confidential consideration that was always said to have been supported by some source Tracy was not at liberty to reveal, and the recipient of the call was not allowed to tell anyone about the call.  It typically didn't take long to learn that Tracy had made the same call, with the same content, under the same strictures of secrecy, to various other people.

Back to the matter of the Manager.  The Committee to recommend semi-finalists gave the Commission its choices, which was late summer or early fall of 2016, and I was on the Commission. I had no intention of running for re-election, but I had to participate in choosing a new Manager.  So I made public statements-- from this blog and in a Commission meeting-- to say that I would welcome the involvement of anyone planning to run for Commission, or even thinking about it.  I knew Dan Samaria was planning to run, and no one else had yet offered him- or herself, but I figured someone must be thinking about it.  I wanted any Village residents who would be Commissioners, and who would work particularly closely with the new Manager, to have as much say as possible as to who that person would be.  I promised to share any information I got, and offer Commission aspirants extra weight in choosing the finalists, and the ultimate choice.  No one came forward to take me up on this offer.

Once the three finalists were chosen, I got the Tracy call.  She thought the person we chose would be a poor choice, and she thought one of the other candidates-- one who had already been eliminated-- would be the best choice.  And she said this for what turned out to be a very funny reason.  Well, when I say funny...  Being the provocateur he can sometimes be, Chuck Ross had told Tracy that one of the candidates had a background as an engineer, as does Tracy.   So Tracy decided the engineer would be best.  I told Tracy that the person she said she preferred was no longer in the running, and I had no way, even if I agreed with her (which I didn't), to resurrect his application.

So Tracy got elected to the Commission, and she allowed herself to be chosen as Mayor.  And without any experience on the Commission, or on any major Village Board, or any experience as a Mayor, Tracy decided the Manager had too much power, and she, Tracy, and whoever else was on the Commission, and Commissions to come, should snatch away some of that power.

As I view it, Tracy is jealous and resentful.  She's mad that Sharon Ragoonan got what she, Tracy, the pretender, wanted, and like a bigger kid, she wants to grab some of it away for herself.  She makes more or less clear she's mad at Heidi Siegel and the last Commission, thinking all of them either failed or behaved badly.  And even though Tracy is part of a new majority, and we have a new Manager, Tracy wants to punish Sharon and the minority of the current Commission for what she can't take out on Heidi and the majority of the old Commission.

But if part of Tracy's alleged reasoning is that Heidi had too much power, so Sharon should have less, the other part of her alleged reasoning is that the prior Commission failed proper oversight.  If taking power away from the Manager cures the problem of managers with too much power, how does transferring more power to the Commission address the problem of incompetent Commissions?   And further, if Tracy's answer to misguided Managers is to remove some of their authority, through what she likes to call "checks and balances" (you can never go wrong with patriotic slogans), what would be her answer to misguided Commissioners, of which we have had more than a few?  Should the voters only provisionally elect Commissioners, with those leanings needing approval from some higher power, as the Manager should only provisionally hire, subject to the Commission's approval?