4-1

There were several votes like that at the Commission meeting last night.  And Roxy Ross was on the very short end of each of them.  I don't think Roxy was having a good time of it, either.  It's not fun being on the short end of 4-1 votes, even when you're right, which Roxy was, each time.

There's an odd phrase to describe being happy about something.  The phrase is "like a pig in shit."  Everyone likes to be happy, but it would be hard to imagine finding it pleasing to be wallowing in shit.  I'm not sure even a pig would like that.  But that's what the four dominant Commissioners were doing, and they didn't seem to recognize for what it was that they were swimming in the stuff.

Harvey Bilt is our newest Commissioner, and he showed himself to be the fourth Tracy Truppman bobble-head doll.  I calculate he's the fourth, because I'm considering Tracy herself to be a Tracy Truppman bobble-head doll.  As someone in the audience last night said, maybe there should be a rule that new Commissioners are not allowed to speak.  They just have to listen.  And learn.  And if that meant that four of them were still silent, and only Roxy Ross was allowed to speak, we'd be far ahead by now.

The four very clearly have no idea what they're doing, or where they're trying to go.  Mostly, they just lurch around like Keystone Kops, unable to form any sort of meaning.  They have conversations that don't need to be had (clearly for no purpose than to hear themselves talk and fall in love with their own reflections), and last night, they specialized in trying to re-invent the wheel, on many occasions.  One discussion was about our new interim Manager, and whether the Commission should empower him to hurry up and hire a new Police Chief, or alternatively it should direct him to delay this hiring.  The "Commission" clearly had not the slightest understanding that Krishan Manners is the (interim) MANAGER.  He wasn't hired to be a secretary, or Tracy's assistant.  (I know, Tracy thinks everyone is hired to be her assistant.  I'd say she'll get over it, but she never has, and now, we've created a monster who will never, ever understand that she's not the center of the universe.)  He's the (interim) Manager.  That means he's the Manager.  And he has all of the responsibilities and prerogatives of the Manager.  Because he is the Manager.  The right to hire a new Police Chief, any time, and any way in the world he wants to do it, is not something the Commission can bestow on him or withhold from him.  And Krishan was graceful enough not to remind them of that fact.

It was both amusing and tragic to watch the four as they circled around the necessity to make decisions.  Jenny and Harvey should be more than familiar with the task, both of them having served on the Code Compliance Board.  But both of them, and Tracy, and the caricature that is Will Tudor, were every bit the deer in the headlights when they had to confront real issues, and conclude something.  I guess Harvey had an inkling that it would be like this, and that's why he ran like hell when I proposed a Meet the Candidates exercise in which he would have to have Commission-like discussions, and form Commission-like conclusions.  The four couldn't begin to do it.  They sputtered, and talked around, and possibly wet their pants.  They wanted delay, "workshops," and anything that would get them out of the hot seat.  But the hot seat is precisely what they asked for when they ran, and not one of the four could handle it.

They hid behind the concept of trying to get their neighbors to make decisions for them.  Tracy, for one, had the dodge that given enough "workshops," for example, "everyone" would agree about driveways, or whatever else.  News flash for ya, Tracy: "everyone" will never agree about anything.  The best you can hope for, if you want to hide from the responsibility to make decisions, is to identify and satisfy some sort of majority of your neighbors.  You can tell yourself that if you can find a majority, then they must be right.  Or at least that it's that many fewer people who will be mad at you.

Jenny Johnson-Sardella had an idea like that, too.  Somewhere in the discussion of choosing a new Manager from the meager list of mostly unimpressive applicants, Jenny said we "want to get it right."  News flash for you, too, Jenny: we already did.  We started out with about 57 applicants last summer, and very many people, including your neighbors, worked very hard to find the right Manager.  It was fine, until Tracy and you and the other bobble-head doll made Sharon Ragoonan's life miserable, and ran her out of here.  Do you know what consensus of how many people you overthrew to create the problem you now think you're going to solve?  And you three (now with a fourth, for extra padding, and to make yourselves imagine that might must, of course, make right) ran on an offer to "listen to [your] neighbors?"  Well, if you were listening, you were demonstrating a breathtaking failure to hear them.

The Agenda last night was actually very short.  It wasn't easy for the bobble-heads to torture it into a 3 3/4 hour meeting.  But that's what they did, bungling around, observing themselves talk and posture, and trying desperately not to make decisions that would 1) maybe be unpopular, and 2) screw up anything else.