If Galileo Isn't Rolling in His Grave, He Should Be.

No, the earth does not revolve around the sun.  But neither does the sun revolve around the earth.  Or not generally so. All of it revolves around Tracy Truppman.  Or so Tracy is working to reconfigure the cosmos.

At this week's Commission meeting, Chuck Ross expressed concerns about Tracy and her autocratic commandeering of the Village.  He had a lengthier statement, from which he read parts.  Chuck identified a number of areas where Tracy simply acted alone, or she acted with the subordination of the Village Manager, but not with the agreement, or even knowledge, of the Commission.

In her one+ years on the Commission, Tracy has corralled and limited her neighbors, her colleagues, and, with the enabling of the latter, Village staff.  Tracy, who was never, ever one for self-restraint or limitation, has come down hard on her neighbors.  She controls, more than any other Mayor I've witnessed, how much they're allowed to speak in Commission meetings.  Twice (once more than second place, and twice more than any other Mayor), she has threatened to have her neighbors removed from meetings (for speaking more than three minutes, or for speaking from their seats), and she has attempted to give such orders to Village police (who adultly ignored her).  Tracy, running in part on a platform of offering to be the voice of her neighbors, has, more than any other Commissioner in my experience, completely and grossly ignored the clearly expressed wishes of her neighbors.  Tracy's construction of the Commission of which she is a part is completely separate from, and functions wholly independently of, the people who live and own property here.

It remains a mystery why Tracy's Commission colleagues are mindless and spineless on the Commission.  Either they're in awe of Tracy, or they're afraid of her, or they simply have no independent thoughts, and it's easier for them just to do whatever Tracy wants.  It's caricaturish, but not comical (it's certainly not funny), to watch them fold each and every meeting.  Either they simply vote to uphold whatever Tracy makes clear she wants from them, or they sputter, ramble, and stumble, until they finally accede to her.  A month ago, we saw Tracy demand accession from two of her stooges/bobbleheads, and they both voted stupidly to uphold a document it became clear they had never seen.  In a comment from the blog post that immediately precedes this one, Dan Schneiger described watching Harvey Bilt shrivel completely as soon as Big Mama Truppman ordered him to belt up.  I have never seen this on a Commission dais.  And I have known Harvey Bilt for a long time.  I generally like him.  He has shown long and seemingly heart felt devotion to the Village.  He can be quirky at times, but he always seemed fundamentally reliable.  Until now.  He's gone.  He's absent.  He's nothing but an empty puppet for Tracy to control.  You can still sometimes see the occasional odd, and sometimes goofy, proposal from Harvey.  But Dan Schneiger described it as well as it can be described.  Harvey isn't Harvey any more.  He's one of Tracy's little people.  (I was going to say one of Tracy's little men, but it's hard to think of Harvey as a man any more, at least once Tracy takes her throne.)

With the deaf, blind, and mindless (and unwavering) support of Tracy's stooges/bobbleheads, she orders whatever she wants from the Village Manager and the Village Attorney.  It's unknown if she also orders around other Village employees, which the Charter forbids, but it doesn't matter, since the Manager will clearly do any of Tracy's bidding anyway.  She gets away with this, because the Manager and the Attorney want to keep their jobs more than they insist on propriety, and because Tracy has demonstrated that anyone who doesn't do what she says will be fired.   And her three Commission stooges/bobbleheads have shown they will back her up.

If a past Mayor like Noah Jacobs went out of bounds from time to time, Tracy has obliterated the concept of bounds, if only for herself.  And to do it, as Chuck Ross points out, she has also had to ignore the Charter.  She has no use for accepted process and protocol, and she flatly tramples laws.  She signs orders and makes deals without, as the Charter requires, even reporting to the Commission, much less relying on its agreement (which she can be assured of getting anyway, compliments of the stooges/bobbleheads).

As an aside, it's also interesting about Tracy's idiosyncratic, and idiotic, fixations.   She seems to fancy herself an "engineer," and she claims to have some training in engineering, the result being that she always wants the input of engineers.  She wanted an engineer to be our Village Manager.  Chuck Ross' comments included a description of Tracy's complete reliance on advice that may or may not have been worthy and relevant, because that advice came from an engineer.  What's even more interesting here is that our established consultant/contractor in these matters, Craig A Smith, is an engineering firm.  But they're not Tracy's engineers.  They submitted hundreds of pages of data, analysis, and recommendation.  Tracy's engineer submitted five pages of boilerplate, with a brief suggestion that the Village had issues.

Tracy sees the Village, and the universe, as extensions of herself, or as entities the purpose of whose existences is to serve her.  Personally.  She got her neighbors to vote for her, she has three of them (Commission colleagues) entirely under her thumb, and she acts the lord/lady of Village employees.  Has this all worked out well anyway?  Not at all.  Not only has Tracy caused increasing disinterest in her neighbors, who either don't attend meetings any more, or they leave early in disgust, and not only has she cost the Village one good employee and the independent input of two others, but she may, as Chuck pointed out, have created a huge fiscal problem for the Village.  And she has accomplished nothing.  We're making progress on our fiscal reports to the State?  That would have happened anyway, with the direction of the Manager Tracy ousted.  Police enforcement is better?  It was already better, under the new Chief, who was elevated by the Manager Tracy ousted.  We cleaned up a big mess from a hurricane?  It's beginning to appear that Tracy's autocratic personal management of this clean-up not only didn't make things any better, but it may have made them worse, by Tracy's having failed to get the right pieces in place at the right time.  Unfortunately, Tracy won't let a manager manage, and she won't even listen to the voice of experience and reason, which comes out of Roxy Ross' mouth.

We're stuck with Tracy for almost three more years, unless she has the insight and decency to resign.  But we're not necessarily stuck with Tracy the uber autocrat for almost three more years.  As Chuck pointed out in a recent blog comment, if we can elect three Commissioners in November, none of whom drinks whatever Koolaid Tracy tries to force-feed them, then she has no more power, except for her one vote.  And the Village can return to function, in the interest and with the participation of the people who live and own property here.  Until then, the universe will continue to revolve around Tracy "Big Mama" Truppman.