Ludington City Council Meeting, April 8, 2024: Totally Eclipsed

[XLFD]

Mere hours before the convening of the April 8, 2024 meeting of the Ludington City Council, we all had been able to view the nearly full solar eclipse in the sky over this city.  With a pair of eclipse glasses gleaned from the local library, this reporter saw over 90% of the sun covered by the moon.  The event inspired my first public comment of the evening, and those glasses would later protect me a second time after the eclipse was totally gone.

Assistant Prosecutor Beth Hand led off the public comment after the invocation and pledge had been finished.  Her main focus was herself, touting her experience and aptitude in prosecuting and announcing her candidacy for the county prosecutor job being vacated at the end of the year.  Having seen her in action, she's competent enough, but she overplays her 'hand', going after some very sketchy prosecutions.  One might suggest that Prosecutor Lauren Kreinbrink ultimately has chosen what to prosecute over the last four years, but Ms. Hand goes after those with equal zeal than she does for the easily proven hard crimes.

I would be the only other person to speak at this comment, giving a little dose of what was happening in the rest of this meeting and its relation to the heavens:

XLFD: (10:00 in the video): "Eclipsing the truth.  At last meeting, I heard one councilor defend a so-called competitive bidding process which had five of his fellow councilors see and consider only the bid of one company, owned by one of our city manager's close friends from Wisconsin, it was not an open, proper, and fair process no matter how many moons you want to put in front of it.  She must be a very close friend to the city manager for him to compromise what little is left of his integrity by doing what he did. 

I then heard another describe a lawsuit where a local judge with four decades of experience found that the city council did not fulfill their statutory duties before holding an election, and that it was a material error.  A reversal by the appeals court will not eclipse the fact that this city council did not do their duties required under law, the voters were kept ignorant of the high cost of the charter revision, nor does it alter the fact that the city attorney made tens of thousands of dollars because he couldn't put one extra clause in his drafted resolution to inform the council and the voters of costs and compensation. 

Our city attorney with the complicity of city leaders is taking us deeper into the eclipse as witnessed by this meeting's agenda featuring only two policy actions.  Mr. Hammersley has made what was an 11-page document of FOIA Procedures into a 15 page document, and that expansion gives him, as the FOIA Coordinator, a ton of extra power and discretion and as you would expect, make it a lot harder for the public to view public records.  Later on, he has developed a resolution meant to further curb public expression during public comment periods.  I asked to play a video showing LPD in action during my public comment period on the big screen for this meeting, my request was ignored.  

On April Fools Day, I heard an awful lot of lip service by the police chief saying how important it was to keep communication lines open with the public, yet the LPD social media page does not allow comments, except from some members of the public, all that seem to be fully behind the LPD.  You people can say you want transparency and community input as often as you wish, but your actions always eclipse your words.  Reject the darkness." [END Comment]

I would strap on my eclipse glasses right after this to make a statement and keep them on the rest of the meeting, except for my second comment.  When you use those glasses, you can't see anything other than the sun, so I was effectively blind, but following along. 

The council packet had two changes to the city's FOIA policy and public comment policy, the latter would be stricken from the agenda by motion of Councilor Jack Bulger who noted that the proposed policy had not yet been reviewed by committee and introduced to the council only on Friday-- indicating that the mayor had used the city attorney to draft the resolution, and figuring it might not pass muster upon committee and citizen review.  I expect the costly effort was to address my calling the previous effort (suspended a year ago) on muzzling citizens a disaster at the last meeting.  That motion passed and the milder muzzling this time around was struck from the agenda.

The FOIA procedures were amended with the 11 page record replaced with the 15 pages of policy found in the packet, p. 32-46  City Attorney Hammersley has made this new document self-contradictory in several places and has presented a lot of liability to the city when the appeals start coming.  One example, at the bottom of p. 38 it has those who want to appeal fees contact the city manager (who is the default FOIA Coordinator) and infers they make the decision, while the law indicates that the city council receives such appeals, as does the next page in Hammersley's new policy.  

Since the city council figured that the new policy would retard efforts to get embarrassing police body cams to those who suffered at the hands of those embarrassingly poorly-trained police and the one medium that reports on them, they passed the new policy without the same concern they had for the public comment rules.  This long, twisted, policy was never a topic in any of the committee meetings, it was the city attorney's shot at trying to obfuscate his public extortion charge by changing the rules after he violated the old rules.  Once again, they had Councilor John Terzano state an untruth in order to cover up Hammersley's transgression:

19:50:  "We had two policies in place, one was the city approved FOIA policy and the one that been approved for the Ludington Police Department."

This was a complete lie furnished to Terzano, it's disappointing he failed to verify what he was fed.  The LPD has always followed the same rules as the city since 2015, when changes in state law had the council create one policy that applied to all departments and only passed one Fee Estimation Worksheet for all departments.  I've likely made over 50 FOIA requests to the LPD and the city proper each during that time, and it's all been the same policy and forms coming back at me.  Our lying city staff and city attorney will be exposed once a FOIA (how ironic) I sent out to ask for that second policy and the minutes of the meeting at which it was passed is found not to exist.  

The rest of the meeting consisted of less controversial actions, all passed 6-0, Councilor Winczewski was absent):

- approved Freedom Festival activities by the Jaycees

- approved Lakestride Half-marathon races and associated activities for June 7-8

- approved Ludington League Beach Volleyball request for 2 additional courts

- adopted an ordinance which would allow the Hegg building to build an exit door on the north side of their building facing Court Street.  

- approved use of ARPA funds for radar and laser units for the LPD.  

Between some of these actions, Councilor Wally Cain made a lengthy 10-minute comment.  The purpose was to contrast the views I express on city policy and personnel at council meetings to all the good things that are going on in town.  Apparently, he liked the accolades from his peers following his last diatribe made at the prior meeting.  This isn't very helpful, except that it shows how out of touch he is with actually bettering the city when he looks only at what we are already doing right (in spite of our city government), rather than the problems he claims occurs in a different city than his.  Let us just look at the first couple paragraphs, before he goes 'convention & visitor's bureau' on us.  

Councilor Wally Cain:  "Two weeks ago, I read a statement about how the city, its employees and its residents deserved respect from the disrupter.  Let me clarify what I mean by respect.  In doing so, I want to show you one perspective of our city and then I want to show you my perspective of our city.  I listened to recordings of public comments by the disrupter from previous council meetings.  Here are some of the words and phrases that stand out to me.  I want you to get the gist of the language and tone used.

Anti-Citizen Cain, showing utmost respect in his mind, assigns a negative title to me which I've never claimed and states plainly that I am disrespectful towards other residents, without a single instance of such behavior.  Take a look at the recall petitions claiming abuses by city leaders at the expense of the citizens, and his votes against their interests.  His perspective turns out to be Pollyannish, completely denying the reality of the challenges that Ludington faces, many of those challenges coming from city officials who consider themselves elites rather than the public servants they are.  He continues by critiquing the language I used, without dealing with the city's actions that inspired them:

“…Fruit of the poisonous City Hall Tree.  Fraud and favoritism…unethical acts…lie by omission…illegal acts…violate city, state, and federal laws…theft…unlawfully… Done quite a lot of objectionable acts…each accepted a fraudulent definition of commercial property…give two grifters from Grand Rapids…betrayed the public… Reckless…hysterical …pawn off school property…dishing out public money…handout from the community chest under false pretensions…greasing the hands of outsiders…put your forgettable names on a plaque”

I fully own each of these as the most truthful observations of what I have seen our officials do with very little regard for our money or ethical conduct.  When removed from context, they may seem unduly critical, but Wally has never decided to argue on their merits, and he definitely never does so in the 16 minutes he's had the floor over the last two meetings.  If you're still awake at the end of this, you wonder what purpose this was supposed to serve, other than an attempt to suppress the voices of those who dare speak up about an issue, by suggesting you're not living in the same city as him. 

Other than that, it's pablum for the masses not paying attention and easily distracted by legerdemain.  Wally references the "Tale of Two Cities" and Charles Dickens at the very beginning, probably not realizing that much of the novel happens during the French Revolution in Paris, where city officials were not treated with a lot of respect when their crimes and transgressions were found out by the disruptors.

I would start off the second comment period ignoring the Cain lecture, there just wasn't a lot there to speak about that could be made on the spot in 1/5 of the time, so I went with my prepared statement, a notice to the city attorney that he will be under another investigation:

XLFD:  "I'm still haggling with lawyers over a federal lawsuit over nearly getting killed in your deer cull thing and then getting served a letter of trespass for a public park, which is still active by the way.  But I did recently send a letter to the state's Attorney Grievance Commission regarding our 'criminal' attorney Ross Hammersley and his latest money-making/anti-transparency scheme, and I will read it until my time to speak is up, unless our crooked barrister wants me to continue.  

STATEMENT OF ALLEGED MISCONDUCT

Attorney Ross Hammersley acting as the City of Ludington's (COL) FOIA Coordinator ignored using the FOIA Cost Estimation Fee Worksheet approved in 2015 by the COL's council (EXHIBIT 1) and used since with a minor amendment in 2019 to reflect the larger wage rates, to introduce his own creation, a much-different worksheet (EXHIBIT 2) for the response of a 2-11-2024 FOIA request, in order to willfully and corruptly demand a payment of $229.37 for its fulfillment, and a $114.69 deposit for compilation to start.  

Complainant has made numerous FOIA requests to the COL since 2019 for the same type of records and has been charged nothing, these can be made available on request.  The COL council has not changed any of their fee policies, or their fee worksheets since 2019.  For whatever reason, Hammersley introduced a worksheet that would charge a flat rate of $25 for every video, even if no retractions were needed and the video was a simple 31 second phone call caught on a body cam (as later acknowledged).  The FOIA does not allow such unwarranted charges, but Hammersley implemented them by creating and introducing his own fee worksheet.  (At this point the time expired, leaving the last six paragraphs of the statement unstated; fortunately, the AGC does not have a time limit).  

Verily, this issue should be in the hands of the AGC, along with the Michigan State Police to look at the criminal side.  Ross Hammersley seems to believe that the City of Ludington doesn't have to follow local laws (witness all those broken in the deer culls) or state laws and thinks he can make things right by changing the rules afterwards with the complicity of the city council.

I would be followed by Daniel Jensen, warning us of PFAS, Agenda 21, and the timing of this eclipse, and Jack Stibitz, Councilor Cheri Stibitz's father and former Charter Revision Commission member (before they lost in court) who not surprisingly kowtowed to the mayor and staff for their service against all the noise from one person (one might assume he was talking about Wally and his long-winded speeches, but he probably wasn't). 

Before the council adjourned, they bantered amongst themselves about their victory in the appeal court over their nemesis, glorifying among other things the point that they could satisfy their duty to fix the costs of the charter revision by concealing it in their budget, so that the voters would be totally ignorant of the costs when they went to the polls.  That's the city they live in, totally eclipsed from the ideals of being a public servant.

[Freedom Seeker]

... subtitled "The Disruptor Sits in Total Darkness." Very clever prop X. If only Wally Cain or Ross Hammersley had half the brilliance as you they might brightly see the truth.

On the other side of the moon, I'm impressed that Jack Bulger had sense to realize the darkness of the mayor/manager/insider group? seemingly utilizing illegal authority to have Hammersley draft a revised FOIA policy outside of Council.

If only those dark-mongers (lovers of darkness) would realize your brilliance and utilize it rather than eclipse it, there would be a lot more peace and sunshine in the City of Ludington.

The tale of the City of Ludington is that when their darkness is pointed out, instead of being righteous and revealing truth and correcting their mistakes, with humility of a true public servant, they continue to shut up the public up and confine them in darkness. 

One moral of the sad story:  Evil men's ways are right in their own darkness and they will fight with the unrighteousness of Cain to cover up their sins.

[XLFD]

You betray your own cleverness when you finish up with a nod to the original Cain.  I figured that it would be pretty easy to link Cain's killing of his brother to the character assassination I'm experiencing from our modern version, but for some reason, I just wasn't Abel to do that.

[Willy]

Thanks for the report X. Very clever comparing Ludington City Hall to the eclipse. So I tried to put it in a more visual context.

https://ludingtoncitizen.ning.com/photo/ludington-city-hall-s-dark-...

[Freedom Seeker]

Very creative depiction...and sadly true, Willy