Ludington City Council Meeting, May 6th, 2024: Tone Deafness

[XLFD]

On May 6 2024, the Ludington City Council and Mayor Mark Barnett faced the music... and lost any semblance of being a law-abiding or benign public body.  An otherwise sparse agenda packet had the council approve a modest change order for the $1.4 million Cartier Park bathhouse project, some 2023 audit cleanup tasks, and an appointment of the deputy county administrator to the DDA Board, also had two points of immediate interest to the freedom loving people of Ludington.

The first was a resolution to amend the council's public comment policy found on p. 45 of the packet, which was modified after the packet was issued and given to the council as a 'laydown', public records given only to them, by the city attorney.  Ergo, the resolution, which was eventually passed 6-1 (with an unlikely holdout going against it) was left unknown as to its contents by the people in attendance and watching at home in the livestream. 

Councilor Wally Cain would argue primarily against the concept of written comments read at meetings, pointing out that such correspondence helped decide some of the more controversial issues like beach parking fees and the marijuana dispensary issue.  Others looked at the resolution, three attorneys amongst them, and passed it believing it to be important to do so.  

During the first public comment period, Mike Shaw, a candidate for the Fifth Ward challenging Cain, displayed his piety by recognizing the National Day of Prayer and a few of the many volunteers who run support services for the downtrodden homeless, among these were Tim and Tammy Martin of Hospitality, Inc.  He was followed by a guy in a Gus Macker suit (sounding a lot like Chris from WMOM) giving an update on how the tournament preparation is coming along under new management.  This would be the first time I followed a basketball wearing a top hat during public comment (note that Chris wearing a costume and using a false name was not chided by the mayor for a violation of public comment rules), but it would not be the first time I was commanded to stop mid-sentence, as I was here rudely by Mayor Barnett, who gave the invocation at this meeting , but failed to use the wisdom granted by Providence.

XLFD: (14:00 in) "Let this meeting be instructive to the citizen who sees their so-called representatives diminish their rights under the First Amendment with a new restrictive public comment policy and then go into closed session at the end of the meeting to discuss in secrecy about the city's best kept secret they withheld from the voting public back in 2022.  This council had a duty beck then to fix the costs of a charter revision and the compensation of a committee before the election where an uninformed electorate was misled to believe that a committee would look at doing revision work at no additional costs, rather than the $82,000 hidden deep in the budget and never fixed by any council action.  Does keeping the public totally ignorant of how you waste their money make you feel morally superior?

In the city charter, section 8.4(2) it says:  the budget shall indicate "The anticipated income and expense and profit and loss for the ensuing year for each enterprise fund operated by the City. The total of proposed expenditures shall not exceed the total of estimated income plus carried forward fund balance."  The City violated the charter by infusing the Cartier Campground and City Marina enterprise funds with a whole lot of general fund money and Harbor View money over the last couple of years.  And while our city hall subsidized campground and marinas, posing unconvincingly as enterprise funds, which unfairly compete with the city's private sector businesses, the state comes in and gives Cartier campgrounds grants of $450,000 and even more for just replacing one dock at the city marina, in their ongoing effort of replacing all docks.  No wonder the city is still amending its 2023 budget in May 2024, it's hard to keep up with all of the unlawful and amoral expenses and revenues you're dealing with and greedily grabbing more through overriding Headlee rollbacks.  

At the last meeting, your ethically-challenged city attorney plainly stated that he had already gave me incident reports for two of the FOIA requests I had made, while the record clearly shows that he never provided them, I finally got those reports after making another FOIA appeal for them, and they show why the police chief wanted to go to war against transparency and charge a media outlet about $450 and $900 for the body cam videos of those arrests and keep the reports to himself.  Just on paper, the responding units went against multiple LPD policies in conducting their arrests.  The police chief [their timer rang at this point] should know that's the case and do something about it, but all he does is resist and oppose any scrutiny on his young staff..."

This is where I was cut off in mid-sentence by Mayor Barnett, in violation of the existing rules and the resolution they were to pass:

I let the mayor know I had not yet finished my sentence; he disrespectfully told me that I was all set. I would have finished:  "...of officers led by brutal perjurer Captain Haveman in the field." 

Immediately after the comment period ended, Councilor Jack Bulger would propose scratching the closed session proposed and open it up as an amendment to the agenda, perhaps as a nod to my comment faulting the city for their secrecy.  They would agree and go onto the 2023 Ludington Fire Department report that lasted about 30 minutes.  Annual department reports of the prior year are nice to have presentations on, but this is the first year in recent memory that the city is trotting these out in April and now May.

After the city conducted the last of their normal business other than what they had originally planned for a closed session, the second public comment period arrived and I had a prepared comment that I would not be able to deliver due to the new rules inside the freshly-passed resolution, which limited my rights under the First Amendment (as noted in my earlier comment).  

If an oppressive government attempts to limit your protected speech in any way, it is a citizen's duty to fight back.  This is not just my opinion, look at the writing of Jefferson, Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.  I saw this one passage and I immediately knew that I had to have background music for my second comment, for I was sure that this corrupted body acting under the thumb of Mayor Barnett would pass this faulty resolution this time around.

At 1:12:00 into the meeting I would use a mellow instrumental playing from my phone as I gave my name and other information, all during that time, Mayor Barnett would go ballistic, banging his gavel and telling me that I was out of order for the simple act of having background music to accentuate the comments I was to make. 

I had the floor, I was engaging in protected speech, Mayor Barnett was out of order in violating my rights.  We all know what the Bill of Rights says under the First Amendment, but the state Constitution, which every single officer behind their raised dais had took an oath to protect and/or affirm says it plainly enough in Article I Section 5:  "Every person may freely speak, write, express and publish his views on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of such right; and no law shall be enacted to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press."  Speaking in verse or in time with a soundtrack to better convey my point in public comment is not an abuse of my right-- but passing a resolution to outlaw such activity is an abuse of government authority. 

I will continue to express myself at public meetings with musical accompaniment until this diseased public body affirms my right to do so.  I will support, acknowledge, and vigorously applaud any other duty-bound citizen who is removed from future meetings for doing so.  These villains should repent their iniquity at this meeting, sitting idly by when they should know better, while the police chief escorted me out of the council chambers for background music during my own public comment.  One should wear this expulsion as a badge of honor, while Chief Christopher Jones own badge grows even more tarnished.  

This incident reminded me of Bomont, a fictional town in the film "Footloose", where their village council banned dancing.  Ludington's leaders have taken the extreme measure of banning music in their sphere of influence, if they had the chance they would ban 'disrespect', which to them is disagreeing with the sick groupthink that they embrace when it comes to their actual disrespect to the taxpayers and citizens they are supposed to represent.  This fight against tyranny will come to a head, and it will have a soundtrack.

The council meeting would end with City attorney Ross Hammersley getting up around 1:15:00 into the meeting and talking to the council for over 20 minutes about whether they should try to get around $500 for taxable costs (covering filing fees and publishing fees) in their recent victory in the appeals court.  This would come at the expense of many thousands in legal bills to the city, to go with the $40,000 or so they had already spent defending their willful efforts to keep the voting public ignorant of the costs of charter revision when they put the question on the ballot, when statute is clear that the council needs to fix the costs. 

They, wisely, did not consider it as a good investment in the end.  At the beginning of the presentation, the mayor would joke around by making sure the attorney was not going to be playing music.  Talk about tone deafness, in the face of a federal lawsuit

[Willy]

Was any reason given for the ordinance? It seems strange for this to become an issue. This goes much deeper than denying a citizen the right to play background music during a comment time at a Council meeting. I think you have a very valid point. What if you wanted to play the video and audio of an illegal or questionable police arrest or action captured on a car or body cam? Or any other recorded media that citizens should be made aware of. This ordinance is not Constitutional and must be changed. I agree with you. The fact that this Council cannot see how this limits free speech is very disturbing.