The Rolling Stones Were Half Right.

"You can't always get what you want."  And don't expect an explanation.

By someone's calculation, there were seven non-Commissioner residents who made public comments during tonight's meeting, and five of them urged the Commission to begin a search for a PERMANENT manager.

The answer was simply no.  The obstruction came from the now reliable three amigos: Ginny O'Halpin, Dan Samaria, and Will Tudor.  All any of them had to offer was refusal to discuss the matter.  They say nothing as to why this kind of discussion, or the actual search, so terrifies them.

A curiosity regarded the previously listed, and now withdrawn, matter of what we could call redistribution of Commissioners' stipends.  It was Ginny O'Halpin who proposed this redistribution, and the result of it would have been to lower the mayor's stipend (Ginny's, at the moment), and increase the stipends of the other four Commissioners.  When this agenda item was mentioned, Ginny announced she had withdrawn it.  And she gave a very peculiar explanation.  She said that "over $17K" had been spent on attorneys, and in view of this expenditure, Ginny has decided she no longer wants to share her stipend.  She gives the impression that she is jealous of all the money that got unloaded on lawyers, and now, she wants to grab as much as she can get, too.  Yuck!

As David Hernandez came to realize that he was getting protection from the majority of the Commission, he became increasingly outspoken, and intrusive.  Not only did he talk over Roxy Ross, a Commissioner who at the time had the floor -- and David would very simply not shut up -- but he later declared that he did not favor any additions to the agenda, as if such a decision was his to make, or frankly had anything to do with him.  He acted like a willful and enabled child who understood that no one was going to limit his behavior.

Then, we had a quick review of the sanitation contract expectation, with a collection of mistakes.

A discussion of a manager's report was aimless and insubstantial.  The big exploration was whether we should have manager's reports once a month or twice a month.  Unless you were ZOOMed in, you have no idea how much discussion this meaningless hair-splitting took.  Interestingly, Mac Kennedy thought he was doing David Hernandez a favor, by inviting him to produce reports only monthly.  But David must have realized that Mac was actually demanding more of him, by asking him to produce reports with actually meaningful content.  Mac's eventual way of expressing that was to refer to the less substantial, and more frequent, offerings as "fluff pieces."  If Mac was asking for more than "fluff pieces," David was declining.  Unable?  Can't be bothered?  Who knows.  It sounded to me mostly like childish and entitled bad behavior.

After this nonsensical conversation came to an arbitrary and empty end, Dan Samaria read some statement as to how amazing is police chief Luis Cabrera.  Mac Kennedy said he thought it was Luis who wrote most of this statement.  I listened to this discussion, but it was impossible to tell what it was about.  One attention-getting insight was that INTERIM manager David Hernandez agreed that Luis was doing a wonderful job, and that David, as the INTERIM manager, is authorized to contract with the police chief, but it was police chief Luis Cabrera who encouraged the Village to hire David Hernandez as public works manager.  So, are the two of them helping each other, potentially at the expense of the Village?  This kind of potential for conflict of interest was described as "the elephant in the room."  Indeed.

There was another angle regarding this matter, and that was the suggestion that a contract or employment agreement was important to protect the police chief.  It didn't take much reading between lines to realize that the problem was that Luis Cabrera might have felt vulnerable to subversive influences from recent former Commissioners (or just one).  What got overlooked in this "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" discussion was that the police chief would not have been in jeopardy but for the collusion, or cowardice, of the immediately former manager.  So, what would have been important to protect the chief was a proper and independent manager.  Checkmate.

Mac Kennedy is talking to himself regarding improving the reliability of a Village calendar.  His own joke was that David Hernandez repeatedly cries "micromanaging" every time anyone tries to improve David's functioning.  Well, OK, Mac is also talking to Roxy Ross.  Will Tudor had no idea what this is about.  Neither did Dan Samaria, who sounded like he was reading from a prepared statement about...not "micromanaging" the manager.  Ginny O'Halpin joined Will Tudor in agreeing that calendars are a good idea.  The "good" outcome of this discussion was that Ginny was getting really bored, and she just wanted to "move on."

Rox Ross thought we should have more protections at active work sites in the Village.  No one could argue with that, right?  Will Tudor doesn't like too much histrionics, like with workshops and other momentum-producing processes.  The next thing we know, someone will require approved parking surfaces, and will require Will to have one.  Rox tried more or less desperately to get the Commission simply to agree to let the Village attorney compose this, but too many people still can't get enough of hearing themselves talk, so the discussion dragged on unbearably.

The crumbs at the end included repeated references from the auditor and our accountant to the remarkable help provided by Chuck Ross, and David Hernandez's admission to Mac Kennedy that no, not all of the boxes of records have been explored.  Mac didn't ask why not, and David didn't say.  David's idea of an accomplishment is getting an extension.  But he doesn't use the extra time to accomplish anything real.

So, do you get what you need?  That's what the Stones reassured.  Although they qualified the reassurance with words like "sometimes" and "might."  It depends what you need.  If you need a Commission that does its job, and that can hold a minimal agenda to a modest investment of time (I quit at 4+ hours tonight, for maybe 2 hours, or maybe less, worth of business), no, you don't get what you need.