The Place Where Ludington Talks
Stretching the Truth with Jimmy Newkirk
Scottville City Manager Jimmy Newkirk put out a newsletter earlier this month and also shared it with Scottville's own MCP in an article: Scottville Dec. 5 update. Newkirk has used such newsletters to keep citizens updated with what's happening in Scottville and their city hall. One normally sees a lot of positive material about the city, and this is good for morale even when some of the material is of questionable validity or is pure propaganda.
Among the rosy outlooks and pats on the back was a paragraph that pointed out some faults in the city as regards certain rental properties. This paragraph followed one that told of their new public officer at city hall, Steve Spangler, who would be conducting rental inspections, so the intent was obviously to paint a portrait of a corrupted Dorian Gray that could be remedied by another city official with nearly a $60K salary contracted through SAFEbuilt.
"We are also restarting the rental inspection programs in Scottville and priority will be on safety with the first round of inspections. There have not been inspections in a long time, and some have never been inspected. Recently rentals in the city have reported electrical fires, insect infestations, and we have already taken many complaints about conditions in some locations. As a community we can and should do better. If you have questions, feel free to reach out to Mr. Spangler."
Under the current Scottville regime, you just don't see a lot of people coming to city hall to complain or offer praise about anything. The last three city commission meetings the Ludington Torch has attended, we haven't seen anyone attending that wasn't a city or county official other than ourselves. The voices we hear from Scottville are of frustration or apathy, and the lack of citizen participation is a definite symptom of such defeatism one sees in Third World countries.
In such an environment, The Ludington Torch found it highly unlikely that city hall received many (if any) complaints from tenants in the city about their living conditions. Few people would call or write city hall normally to register a complaint involving insects or electrical fires; they might call their landlord, the health department, maybe the fire department. But Newkirk was saying there were many complaints and many places that were effectively screaming for the city to have a rental inspector save them. The Ludington Torch decided to do an audit and ask through the FOIA for such complaints, sending this request to the city manager and attorney:
The response was timely received and consisted of seven pages. The first page was an email dated October 24 and the last page was a follow-up email from what is likely the same person dealing with the same address. We can only use the term 'likely', because learned City Attorney Mark Nettleton decided that the name of the complaining tenant was 'a clearly unwarranted invasion of a person's privacy'.
O, the irony. The city has passed a 2018 ordinance and will pass an amended ordinance that mandates a city contractor to enter the homes of every single tenant in the city limits through threat of municipal force and inspect every little nook and cranny of their personal spaces where they sleep and raise their families and that's alright, but giving out their email address on a FOIA response is a 'clearly unwarranted invasion of their personal privacy'. O, the irony.
Anyway, you may wonder why the first (and basically the only) complaint comes at the end of the tenth month of the year, until you realize that at that point is where the city actively solicited such complaints from tenants so that they could help justify their $60,000 contract and their new cubicle at city hall. The other five pages are city-generated documents made in response to the complaint.
The two emailed complaints concerning just one rental property do not mention anything approaching insect infestations and the closest thing to an electrical fire is a furnace igniting, it's not clear whether any fire ensued thereafter, nor do we know whether it was an electrical or gas fire if one did. Let's take a look at what Jimmy Newkirk wrote again and correct it for errors:
"Recently rentals in the city have NEITHER reported electrical fires, NOR insect infestations, and we have already taken ONE many complaints WITH A FOLLOWUP about conditions in ONE some locations. As a CITY MANAGER community we can and should do better WITH CONVEYING FACTS."
If a city manager can so easily and outrightly lie about a simple thing like this in a newsletter to the general public, what's preventing him from spreading falsehoods to them and the city commission he serves to justify other parts about a $60,000 program that the city can ill afford to run without extracting extra thousands of dollars each year from the good landlords around town that have zero complaints against them and their rental properties and take a significant amount of money away from them for maintaining those properties at their current state.
Every landlord, even of the most palatial rental property, will have to spend minimally $525 extra every three years and that amount in one way or another will filter down to their tenants in either increased rents or reduced services-- or even cause them to lose their affordable home and become homeless. Those wanting to build affordable housing for the good citizens of Scottville will be deterred from building within the city limits because then they will not have to fund this unnecessary program, won't have to take time out of their busy schedules each year for such inspections, nor have to be concerned with the moral implications of this 'clearly unwarranted invasion' of their tenants' privacies.
Meanwhile, even without a rental inspection program running just yet (the ordinance will come before the commission next year), the citizens of Scottville still been paying Steve Spangler of SAFEbuilt his contracted monthly amount with the city's general fund as seen in Monday's commission packet:
Sadly, the future growth of the oppressive and dishonest city government in Scottville will come primarily on the backs of tenants living in acceptable living quarters provided by the 90%+ of landlords and landladies that care a lot more about their lessee's well-being and privacy than the city government does.
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