Another Whopper. And the Natives Are Getting Increasingly Restless.

What a mess of a Commission meeting.  It was sort of all over the place.  It started, before the meeting, with an agenda that was completely unmanageable.  How, and why, that very obvious fact didn't occur to the manager and the mayor, who typically put together the agenda, is unexplained.  Normally, with a normal manager and mayor, someone would stop loading an unmanageable agenda.  But the manager and mayor not being normal, that's not what happened.

Then, we started the meeting.  It was a rambling and disorganized affair, and the Commissioners couldn't really figure out how to handle it.  Betsy Wise announced at the outset that she had to leave by 9:00, because she couldn't get a babysitter (it's too bad no one told Betsy when she ran that meetings would occur on a totally predictable basis, and that no one should be on the Commission, if they couldn't clear the time to attend meetings), and there were occasional references to aiming certain parts of the excessive agenda to early enough that Betsy would be there to vote.  It didn't successfully enough happen, but that was the metronome for the first half of the meeting.

Interestingly, one of the first pieces of business was an attempt, again, to derail Dan Samaria's wish to address a problem with the Commission.  Specifically, the problem was with Tracy Truppman.  Tracy, her new girl Rebecca Rodriguez (supposedly the Village's attorney), and even our state Representative, Dotie Joseph, worked to curb Dan and his interest in good government.

We then had some presentations, which took up time.  The auditors let us know that our audits are done, which Tracy interpreted to mean that Village finances never functioned properly until she got on the Commission.  This is standard material for Tracy.  There was some more blah, blah, blah until we got to the two Ordinances.

Ordinance #1 should never have been presented.  The procedure was entirely wrong, not to mention that no speaker from the audience approved of it in any way.  It took us almost 40 minutes to agree that putting it on the agenda was faulty, and to redirect the content of it to a discussion item, which is what it should have been all along.  The person who reportedly put it there-- attorney Rebecca Rodriguez-- was raked considerably over the coals by non-Commissioner Village residents, but she could never admit she had made a mistake.  And the fact that she charged us for the work she should never have done also did not concern her.  She was pressed as to how many $225 hours she put into this wrong Ordinance, and she tried to hide.  She sort of copped to what sounded like about 5-7 hours.  But it was hard to tell.  Anyway, the whole matter was a total and expensive waste.

Ordinance #2 was related, as it turns out, to Ordinance #1, because it was about overages in our legal expenses for this year.  Although Tracy's attorney, Rebecca Rodriguez, tried to focus on the extra expense of having to appeal the denial of our application for FEMA reimbursement, speakers from the audience pointed out two problems.  One was that Gray Robinson told us that we would only be billed for one attorney, but in fact, we were billed for three at a time.  As Roxy Ross illustrated it, before the current GR crew, John Herrin billed us for an average of 3.75 hours per meeting, which included preparation and attendance.  The new crew, either because there were three of them, or because they're inept and inefficient, billed us for 14.5 hours for the March 19 meeting.  To put it slightly differently, we paid $842 for legal services for meetings that involved John Herrin, and $3252.50 for the March 19 meeting.  And then, there were the other legal bills, for April.  The meeting on April 2 resulted in a bill for three attorneys and 10.8 hours, and cost us $2430.  Conference calls between the staff of attorneys and Tracy Truppman consumed 1.8 hours on 3/21 (two attorneys, total $405), 2.4 hours on 4/1 (three attorneys, total $540: not an April Fool's joke), 3.8 hours on 4/16 (three attorneys, total $855), 3.7 hours on 4/18 (two attorneys, $832.50), and 3.7 more hours on 4/26 (three attorneys, another $832.50).  These conference calls all included the two or three attorneys, Tracy Truppman, and the Village manager.  And there were other billing irregularities.

But the other problem was this.  Not only did Gray Robinson bill us excessively, and not only did Tracy Truppman apparently rely extremely heavily on seemingly endless legal advice (not shared with the Commission, much less the rest of us), but it turned out, as a few Village residents pointed out, that the advice was wrong.  Some of it was illegal.  The attorneys, who, with Tracy Truppman's great encouragement, have their hands very deep in the Village's pocket, don't seem to know what they're doing.  They're not up on the law and applicable statutes.  But of course, Tracy Truppman doesn't hire them for that.  She hires them, at our expense, to run interference for her.  Which they do.

So, the Commission, mostly Will Tudor, patted itself on the back, and thought it had made a wonderful accomplishment, when it agreed to extend the Village's coffers by $15K, instead of the $50K of our money Tracy was trying to give away.  And that $15K concession was on condition that we not do some other project that was going to cost $20K.  That money, too, is now earmarked for Tracy's legal stooges.

We didn't really do anything else.  There wasn't time.  What we were shown was a level of arrogance and contempt for the Village and its residents never before seen here.  Dan Samaria was trying to oust Tracy as mayor.  But Tracy ain't goin' nowhere.  She loves this gig.  And she likes feeling so generous with other people's (our) money to impress her new girls.