"Promises, Promises"

This past Tuesday night, there was a Commission event.  It was billed as a workshop, and the purpose was to consider budget fields for the coming year.  A workshop means that no votes will be taken, nor any binding decisions made, and the typical intention is to include non-Commissioner Village residents more than usual.  Generally, it is hoped that more opinion, and insight, would be offered by non-Commissioner Village residents.

Almost no non-Commissioner Village residents attended this supposed workshop.  There were maybe six such Village residents.  I myself wasn't there, but that's because I've been out of town all week.  It seems the most prominent reason others weren't there was that very conspicuously, no back-up was included in the agenda item.  This is unheard of.  Village residents who are interested in the budget pore in great detail over the proposed budget, looking for areas that are unexplained, and for errors, inconsistencies, and expenditures that are either considered excessive or inadequate.  When the draft budget is not available, no one has the slightest idea what's going on.

And it's not for failure to ask.  At least a few Village residents who are normally very interested in the budget asked the Commissioners and the manager for the back-up, and why it wasn't included, and no one was given any response.  None.  What came closest to a response of any kind was an e-mail from the current Village attorney, more or less dismissing the matter at all.  "Thanks for your interest" sort of thing.

So the so-called meeting happened, it lasted three hours, the non-Commissioner Village residents were iced out, and the Commission (three or four of them) decided to do whatever they wanted, having successfully handicapped the concept that anyone else would have anything to say about it.  What runs the Village is one Commissioner (Tracy "Big Mama" Truppman) with the mindless support of Jenny Johnson-Sardella and Betsy Wise, and the usual extra boost provided by Will Tudor.  Dan Samaria complains, but he's boxed out, too.  He's the new Roxy Ross.  So to speak.

As filthy and contemptible, and contemptuous, as this is, it's made worse by the people who are perpetrating it.  Tracy Truppman, Jenny Johnson-Sardella, and Will Tudor had a somewhat unusual candidacy.  None of them had Village government experience, and none of them had any articulated agenda.  They all avoided, as much as they could, settings in which they would have to account for themselves.  The one thing they all alleged was that they would "listen to the residents."  "Voice of the residents" was one campaign phrase used.  That was the one proposal any of them made.  It was the closest any of them came to making their neighbors a promise.  And that offer turned out to be the farthest thing from any actual intention any of them actually had.

They have made a relentless campaign of not listening to their neighbors.  They work first to avoid having to hear what their neighbors have to say.  To the extent they are in any way forced to hear anything, they ignore it completely.  No mayor has been anything like this one when it comes to stopping neighbors from speaking at public comment.  Not only is she strict about the three minute limit, but if anyone talks over that, she interrupts them in a very childish way, just trying to talk louder than they do.  She has also instituted a policy that restricts what Village residents can say at public comment.  No mayor has ever before done this.  And whatever words find a way to get spoken by our neighbors are unresponded-to, including direct questions that are never answered.  E-mails to the Commission and to the manager are not answered.  Fulfillment of public records requests is blocked.

If there was one thing the current Commission is most careful not to do, it's listen to their neighbors.  And this week's budget exercise was a glaring example.  Even this Commission has never before sunk this low.  Keeping their promise to Village residents was a rank failure.  Maybe they had more success keeping promises they made to each other.  But no one knows what those promises were.  We're not told.


PS: I have not elaborated any detail here, like Big Mama's generosity to her lawyer girl, or the Commission's agreement to go further with Betsy Wise's "branding" adventure that doesn't interest anyone.  I'll leave those particulars to commenters.