Not, In Itself, Worth Waiting For. But With the Promise of Better Things to Come.

Well, it happened!  The BP Commission...met!  On Tuesday, there was a notice of an "emergency" meeting which was to occur on Wednesday, and the mechanism would be ZOOM.  All five Commissioners, and the acting manager, and the Village attorney, and the Village clerk, would be "present," presumably from different places, and the public could tune in.  There would even be public comment.

Ginny O'Halpin's stingy offering was that she would only agree to allow the Commission to meet, emergently or otherwise, on condition that nothing except the coronavirus was discussed, and that's all that was on the agenda.  In fact, the only two things on the agenda were resolutions that accepted state of Florida conditions, and the readings and acceptances of these two resolutions did not need to take more than about 10 minutes.  If you want to know where the other 110 minutes went, it's all a blur, and I'm still not sure.  The Village attorney likes being on the clock, and too many other people like to hear themselves talk.  Although one great outcome, which was well worth time spent, was the agreement to meet again, soon and often, and to have an actual, meaningful, and goal-oriented agenda.  Since one of the resolutions passed last night was acceptance of Ron De Santis' edict that municipal meetings can occur without a quorum of participants in the same place, then regular meetings are now permitted, and Ginny can't block them any more.  (It was never made clear, and it's still not clear, why she ever wanted to block them.)  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The meeting started with a collection of technical problems.  First of all, it wasn't true that the eight principals were all in different places, like in their own homes.  Some were, but some were in the administration building, and Dan Samaria was in the log cabin.  Each person used a laptop computer or a smart phone.  As we learned, when devices like these are sufficiently close to each other, they create feedback, which made parts of the beginning of the meeting impossible to hear.  But someone figured this out quickly enough, participants separated more definitively, and we proceeded.

We had our two quick acceptances, there was some meaningless blah, blah, blah, and we eventually found our way to what turned out to be the important part of the meeting: an agreement to meet again, the choice of a date for a subsequent meeting, and acceptance of upcoming agenda items.  It was Roxy Ross -- isn't it always Roxy Ross? -- who suggested that we have a good deal of important work to do, and we should probably plan to meet every two weeks, instead of monthly, at least for a while.  This got agreement from everyone, and Will Tudor, who imposingly and painfully couldn't care less, provided no more than slight resistance.  The chosen date for the next meeting is May 5, and Roxy suggested 6:00, instead of 7:00.  Hey, we're all just sitting around at home anyway, so we might as well start, and end, earlier.  Apparently, Will's not just sitting around at home.  He's doing his day job, whatever that is, and he doesn't get off work until 6:30.  But he agreed to a 6:30 start, which doesn't make any sense, unless he now does his day job from home, in which case, can't he stop at 6:00?  Ah, Will.  So, we're starting at 6:30 on May 5.  And we're meeting again on May 19.

And we're going to talk about actual things.  We have a sanitation contract that's expiring, a hurricane clean-up monitor to secure, a new manager to try to find, a CITT mess to try to worm our way out of (we really can't thank you enough, immediate past Commission), and other real matters.

Apart from the fact that Ginny O'Halpin made the mistake of allowing a setting in which progress could be made despite her, the only other mildly (or maybe more than mildly) interesting thing that happened last night was some inane resistance provided by Will Tudor.  Mac Kennedy, who is apparently mad as hell, and isn't going to take it any more, made a crack that Will is always reliable to say no to anything, which is largely true, and Will tried to make a retort.  But Ginny shut down this little spat, which was too bad, because it would have been fun to watch.  It would have been a lot more fun than anything else that happened last night.  But most importantly, we're alive again, having loosed ourselves from the grip Ginny had around our throats, and we can function now.