Monday, September 7, 2020
Please Don't Vote For Me.
As you know, I'm one of the candidates for Commission this year. It's my third time running. I was elected once, and not the second time. So I'm batting .500. If this was professional baseball, I'd be in the Hall of Fame. Think about that.
I have two kinds of platforms. One is a list of particular goals. I was looking at my campaign handout card from the first time I ran, in 2013. I listed five particulars. Two have been accomplished. In that sense, I'm batting .400. But it's still good enough for the Hall of Fame. This year, I'll have two goals that will carry over from 2013 (median improvement, and street repairs and lighting), and some new goals I didn't need to consider in 2013 (like re-establishing "Transparency, Integrity, and Professionalism" in Village government and management; and working toward more concise and goal-directed meetings).
The other kind of platform is very simple. It's my slogan: "For the Best We Can Be." This is sort of all-purpose, and it's a little like those management terms like TQM (Total Quality Management). There's another abbreviation that implies the same thing, and they both mean always looking for ways to make something better. So, anything that comes along that makes BP better than it is is what I want. I want that for BP. I want it for myself, because I live here. And I want it for you.
But here's the thing. I don't really have a personal agenda. I think of myself as more of a functionary whose job it would be, and was, to keep things stable and adaptive, and to facilitate improvement for the Village. I'm assuming that no one thinks the Village is perfect and cannot be improved.
You're getting three Commissioners after November 3. And you'll make a big mistake if you think about the candidates. I don't think you should vote for me or for any of them. You should vote for the Village, and for yourself. You should decide what you want our Village to be, and choose whichever candidates are going to give you the kind of Village you want. If you happen to be one of the six people running for Commission, you can just vote directly for yourself. If you're anyone else, you'll have to figure out who's going to do for you what you want done. And hold whoever gets elected to what you elected them to do for you.
I told you what my platforms are, to the extent that I have specified them at this point. If you want better medians, repaired streets, attention paid to drainage problems, a higher degree of ethics and responsiveness to you, and for the Village generally to be "the Best [It] Can Be," I'll try again to do that for you. And I'll get administrative functioning restored for you, if that's what you want.
See you in November. And remember, you're not voting for me or any of us. You're voting for you.
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I forgot to mention two other issues we all have to discuss. One is solid waste removal. We used to do it ourselves, which had advantages (appreciated by some) and disadvantages, and now, we have an outside contractor do it, which also has advantages and disadvantages. Our contract is up -- it has been for a while, but the prior Commission ignored it -- and we have to decide what to do. We can 1) keep exactly what we have, 2) decide we like the new system of relying on an outside contractor, but we're not satisfied with the particular one we have, and we want to switch to another one, or 3) decide that we prefer to resume running our own program, and outfit ourselves to do it again. We all need to decide which we prefer, and your Commission, and competent management, assuming we choose competent management again, has to enact whatever we choose.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing we have to discuss is 6th Avenue. We don't have to do anything about 6th Avenue, or we can ask the state to consider some changes to it. We have to decide whether we're generally satisfied enough, or we wish the state would change some things about 6th Avenue. And if the latter, we have to decide what we want to ask them to change. This is something we will work to decide together, and your Commission will take a leading role in making any requests we might like the state to consider.
We have a third option for solid waste, Fred. We can "piggyback" onto the contract of another municipality. Way back in June when our public works director (overseer of solid waste) was also our village manager, the commission instructed him to look into all three options and present them all at an upcoming meeting. He said he could have that all done by the July meeting. I suggested that was an overly ambitious goal (nice way of saying, "What're you smoking?") and offered an extra month. My colleagues agreed to give him until August to report back. Since then, he didn't even get the advertisement out, didn't look into piggybacking (told me he had one phone call with the county), and didn't formulate the plan to bring waste collection back in-house. (Comm. Will Tudor said he had done some preliminary work on the in-house option, but he hasn't shared that with anyone yet.) Then, David hightailed it out the door before he was due to present all options, and we were back at square one. Thanks to the former attorney and Comm. Rox Ross, the ad is out and a panel has been formed to evaluate all the options and present them to the commission. One of these days, hopefully not too distant from now, this commission will hire a competent manager to CEO the hell out of this village so the commission can merely manage the manager instead of trying to desperately manage the village out of one mess after another. We deserve better than this. We pay for better than this.
ReplyDeleteMac,
DeleteIf you think that's a third option, then we really have four options. We can work with WastePro to get them to improve service. We can independently find a different contractor (which sounds like what you're describing, and what David Hernandez claimed he was working on), we can "piggyback," which is really the same thing as finding some other contractor, or we can decide to do this ourselves again. Will Tudor has no idea what he's talking about. Which I'm sure is why nothing followed the teaser.
As for our deserving better, considering what we pay, we got what we deserved in 2016. We elected a majority that cannot have done better than it did. And we only paid $4000 a year to the person who got us into this mess. Although we paid a lot more than that to the lawyer who enabled her, and her extremely expensive go-fer, Krishan Manners. If someone had managed Tracy Truppman, and if someone would manage Will Tudor (or Ginny O'Halpin, or Dan Samaria) now, we'd have a very different Village.
Fred