Bunker Mentality

What a sad Commission meeting we had last night.  The fact that we only have three Commissioners was offset by the momentum Will Tudor felt to forge ahead with anything at all, because a quorum is a quorum.  Technically.  This meeting was so sad that it could have made you feel like you wanted to cry.  Linda Dillon has been coming to Commission meetings for 40 years, more or less without fail.  She sits in the front row, and she observes.  Only since the reign of the current Commission (the Truppman/Johnson-Sardella/Tudor/Bilt/Wise iterations of it) have I seen Linda arise to speak.  Most of what she says is complaint about this Commission (these last two, since 2016).  Last night, I thought she was on the verge of tears at one point.  And I'm not criticizing Linda Dillon.  I, too, was on the verge of tears last night.

Biscayne Park's "squad" (Tracy "Big Mama" Truppman, her boy, Krishan Manners, and her best/last girl, Rebecca Rodriguez) entered the room together, like a little clot, and the show started.  It's so in-your-face provocative when these three enter together, having completed their pre-meeting strategizing over at the bunker.

There were a couple of minor and uninteresting, and irrelevant, presentations, and then, it was time for the consent agenda.  The consent agenda is a collection of matters that are considered so mundane, so self-contained, so minor, and so patently acceptable that they could be approved as a bundle, with no discussion.  A common component of the consent agenda is minutes from other meetings.  Also included last night was the acceptance of a donated police car.  And an agreement with the state Attorney General's Office about cost-sharing.  This is boilerplate stuff.  It's routine.  It doesn't need any discussion.

So, imagine how peculiar it was to find on the consent agenda the minor, unimportant little matter of a proposed Memorandum of Agreement with North Miami, regarding tree and plant maintenance on medians we share with them on 121st St.  This issue has been the topic of lots of concern among Village residents lately, and it has led to various e-mails sent to Commissioners, asking them not to approve this very faulty Memorandum.  But Tracy and Krishan-boy and Rebecca-girl thought this matter could be approved without any discussion, on the consent agenda.  Dan Samaria didn't think it was that simple and straightforward, and he pulled it from the agenda.  By the time the matter was discussed, much later in the meeting, all three of our remaining Commissioners agreed the agreement should not be approved, and they asked PW Director David Hernandez to go back to CNM to rework it.  Even David Hernandez, who says the agreement was his idea and his baby, admitted it was not a wonderful deal for the Village, but he considered it a foot-in-the-door starting point in an effort to come to agreement with CNM about something.  Anything.  And this is what seemed to the current ruling class like a matter that didn't require, or perhaps deserve, any discussion.

And then, there was the second reading of Tracy and Will's special magistrate Code Board scheme.  It was Mac Kennedy in his public comment who described what it's like to try to communicate with these two autocrats.  One gives you a dead stare, and the other flips papers.  And at the end of public comment, they both ignore everything anyone said-- they don't even comment on it-- and they do whatever they want.  They work as a "majority," in the thinnest sense of the word.  And that's what they did last night.  Dan Samaria said that if they pass this, knowing that two new Commissioners will be joining the Commission in just about a month, Dan will put this new and expensive Ordinance back on the agenda, so representatives of the rest of the Village can have something to say about it.

Precisely the same thing happened about the first reading of the next Ordinance, which was a "rules and procedures" suppression measure.  Resident after resident commented publicly in fierce opposition to this proposal.  Dead-eye stared, and the page-flipper flipped his pages.  And then, they passed their abortion on first reading.  The only thing that represents anything like good news is that second reading won't happen until February, so the new Commissioners can have something to say about it.  (Please vote on January 7, and be very careful with your vote.  Please don't vote for anyone who will function as the newest Tracy Truppman stooge.  This is toxic and destructive, and it needs to come to an end.  Soon!)

She's a funny one, that Tracy Truppman.  I first saw her do this early in 2017.  There was a proposed Ordinance to make it a crime in the Village for anyone to impose "therapy" to try to change people/teens/children from homosexual to heterosexual, and Tracy argued against this Ordinance.  Many municipalities across the state passed Ordinances like this one, and it was the City of Miami Beach that asked us to get on board with it.  Tracy wanted the Village's position to be represented by a Resolution instead.  We just want to say we sort of don't prefer this kind of pseudo-therapeutic abuse of people/teens/children.  But we don't want it to be forbidden.  You would think Tracy, who is herself homosexual, would have had more compassion for homosexual people, and wanted to protect them from abusive parents and pseudo-therapists, but that wasn't her leaning.  And of course, whatever Mama wanted from her Jenny-girl and her Willie-boy, she got.  And last night, Big Mama did it again.  But this time, she had total backing from her Krishan-boy, a manager she completely controls, and her Rebecca-girl, an attorney to whom Tracy gives so much of our money that the so-called attorney can't think straight, except always to do whatever Mama wants.  This issue last night was a whistle-blower protection effort.  Big Mama and Willie-boy and Krishan-boy and Rebecca-girl could think of all kinds of reasons why not.

Similarly, Linda Dillon and Judi Hamelburg requested free use of the recreation building for our used-to-be-invariable Meet-the-Candidates event.  We always had this event, until Tracy encouraged her stooges to refuse to participate, and the fee to rent the building was always waived, until Tracy instructed her stooges not to agree to waive it.  But this time, good Rebecca-girl and Tracy concocted some bizarre argument by which perhaps it wouldn't be a good idea for the Village to waive the fee.  It would somehow make the Village partisan regarding elections.  This approach is not substantive.  It's just nasty.  And just this one time, as hard for him as I'm sure it had to have been, Will Tudor voted with Dan Samaria, and against his Mama.  And let me say, Mama was very displeased.  I don't remember her exact words (she mumbles so quickly and softly that it's hard to understand much of what she says anyway), but she considered this to represent great jeopardy to the Village, and to have been an awful tragedy.

That's pretty much all that happened last night, although there was one more interesting exposee.  During the discussion of the "rules and procedures" suppression of Village residents, the issue was raised about the new placement of the sergeant-at-arms.  We've always had one, or two, and they sit at the back of the room.  This was true when meetings were at the recreation center, and it's been true since we moved meetings back to the log cabin.  But Tracy decided we needed a sergeant-at-arms right at the Commission desk.  Well, this struck some Village residents as unfriendly, and even intimidating.  Tracy's lieutenant, Rebecca-girl, stepped in to explain.  First, she alleged, some Commissioners reportedly said they felt in some way threatened by their neighbors.  Rebecca-girl never named any Commissioners who allegedly claimed they felt this way.  And this was Rebecca-girl's reason for thinking we needed a sergeant-at-arms very close to the delicate and allegedly threatened Commissioners.  But it wasn't just her own idea, she explained.   She had many meetings and conversations with our police chief regarding this issue of placement of the sergeant-at-arms.  Really?  Someone asked her if any of the Commissioners were present for these reported meetings.  According to Rebecca-girl, Tracy Truppman was present for "some, but not all," of these meetings.  Now, the fact is, discussions like this have nothing to do with the Village attorney, or any of the Commissioners (or the Commissioner who is the mayor).  This is something that should have been handled only by the manager.  If he-- Krishan-boy-- wanted to discuss it with the police chief, that's what he could and should have done.  But Big Mama kept her Rebecca-girl on the clock for things that had nothing to do with the Village attorney.  And she paid her attorney with our money.  So the attorney would always protect her.  Which she always does.