Scottville's Minister of Propaganda

[XLFD]

On January 7, 2025, Rob Alway in the Mason County Press (MCP) came out with an article telling us that Scottville's police department comes at a high price to taxpayers.  Subtitled: "As the City Commission faces a nearly $500,000 deficit, one of its police officers is one of the highest paid cops in the county", it went on to tell us about the 'inevitable decision of eliminating the city’s police department'.  

We get the impression as we read the story that Alway is somewhat disappointed that the SPD does not regularly provide their activity reports to the media, and that the two officer SPD force provides only about 44% of the law enforcement responses in the city.  When one considers that two full-time officers can only provide coverage for about 44% of hours in a 168-hour week (unless they work overtime) this isn't an unexpected result. 

But then when Scottville Interim Police Chief Katrina Skinner shows a lot of overtime on her timesheets, she gets labeled one of the highest paid cops, even though when we see the numbers provided by Alway, we see a stretching of the truth.  For example, in 2023 her base pay without overtime was $55,718 which was under the base pay of all county sheriff officers and over $20,000 less than the chief and captain of the Ludington Police Department.  If she was working an inordinate amount of overtime as the only cop in Scottville at that point, then blame then city manager Jimmy Newkirk, who would have been the one approving such overtime.   

What we had in this article appeared to be a thinly veiled piece of marketing for the necessity of eliminating the SPD, using words from the sheriff and current City Manager Clarence Goodlein in support of this notion, both who could benefit in their own way from the elimination of the SPD.  Like any good piece of marketing, the other side of the issue was never considered.

At the commissioner meeting that followed, Goodlein would sneak in a motion to authorize the process of transferring the city's law enforcement services to the MCSO, after telling us that such a move was inevitable.  Unfortunately, the citizens of Scottville, including a couple dozen that attended this meeting without knowing that the SPD was due to be on the guillotine that night, were not able to submit their input or be given an alternative.  For months, several alternative methods of cutting costs had been implemented without eliminating a city service that many citizens thought were valuable.  One can still see "Save the SPD" signs all across the city.

At the time, I thought the MCP article was a mechanism in order to make the city's upcoming sacrifice of the SPD more palatable.  Frankly, the Ludington Torch believed the MCP was being used by the city for propaganda purposes, since the article and city manager's both tried to sell us on the move using similar tactics.  Through a recent FOIA response, that was effectively confirmed when I saw this email that was sent the day before Alway's article was published:

Alway was ready to 'tackle the story' after his vacation.  This is the kind of language that a reporter would use in response to their editor that assigned them to write about something.  One hopes that Alway was given just compensation for being Goodlein's propaganda minister.

[woodsman]

   Alway has had a beef with Skinner since he got a ticket for not keeping  a clean yard a while back.  Pretty sure Clarence is listening to Alway about getting rid of COS police Department, not much said about the DPW as they are milking the COS for all the overtime they can get. Not doing anything about the DPW and canceling SPD as both doing the same thing taking the COS for all the money they possible can.  Would of made more sense is cut both DPW and SPD by one employee and eliminate the overtime for all which is really easy to do.  Just tell them they can work all they want to but your pay is frozen at 40 hour a week and that would end the fleecing of COS .  Keep both departments and get as much done as they can I would guess would see very little cut in service...

[XLFD]

Reducing city services in the short term seems to be a better idea than eliminating a service seen to have value and frequently mentioned in the city code and even the city charter; I like your option.  Alway has very little integrity left, and it's all bottled away in his basement, so holding grudges against city officials doing their job doesn't surprise anyone.  

[Willy]

Again we see why the Mason County Press cannot be trusted to be an unbiased news agency. Good luck to the citizens of Scottville. I like your idea woodsman.