Ludington City Council Meeting, February 10, 2025: For Love of Money

[XLFD]

One doesn't usually see such a thin agenda packet for the Ludington City Council than that of their February 10th, 2025 meeting, with two of the three action items basically ceremonial: to approve the perennial two weekends at the Waterfront Park of the Rhythm and Dunes concert series and make a proclamation of Arbor Day (April 25th.  

Scheduled for this summer's concerts are the musical groups Monsters of Yacht (July 26th) and Klay 'N the Mud (August 2), but for tonight there were also two one-man bands among the peasantry who brought their own presentations to the meeting to match the one other presentation by Kristi Zimmerman of the Chamber Alliance of Mason County.  

Her annual report presentation for the most was dry and full of meaningless jargon common to all talks on economic development matters, focusing on the 2023 Housing Needs Study for this area to explain a plethora of problems inhibiting economic development arising from the area's alleged lack of housing.  Ironically, most of the Ludington and Mason County area have high vacancy rates, way above average in the city at 25.81%, compared to a 'healthy rate' of between 5-10%.

While the high rate is assuredly due to the many seasonally vacant homes and condos you have in the city and county due to our tourist industry, it does so that we could support more industry and business should our housing stock adjust organically rather than by unprincipled government fiat, which is what is in play throughout about half the county.  If those in charge would let the free market decide the local housing market, drop all of the ridiculous regs, and step out of the way, any local housing crisis would fix itself in a short time.  Unfortunately, they 

But this reporter wasn't in Ludington tonight to give them a lesson on practical housing theory, if that was the case I would have traveled to Scottville's concurrent commission meeting and not wasted my breath on our city's clowncilors who can't even figure out how their own rental inspection ordinances and tax giveaways to cronies poisoned the local housing market.  I was there to defend my FOIA fee appeal, where City Attorney Ross "Sewage" Hammersley had charged me fees that were unreasonable and/or unlawful.  

His memo running from p. 37 to 78 of the 80-page packet made up the majority of the packet.  Of that, 10 pages were providing the councilors with a rationale for denying my request.  I had argued in my appeal (p. 54-9) that each of the three fees applied to the request were not kosher.  This was argued further in my three minutes:

XLFD: (5:10 in);  "Our city officials are trying to conceal police misconduct and abuses of the city's credit by erecting massive paywalls for simple FOIA requests.  My appeal tonight comes from me asking to inspect credit card transaction records made by the city for 2024.  I made a broader request five years ago and was supplied the records without costs during the Mayor Miller era.  Now that Mayor Barnett is calling the shots, fraud, thievery and public extortion is the city's new FOIA policy.  This isn't new for this sleazeball ex police chief who fraudulently asked for $2500 for redacting one incident report that turned out to have no redactions past the third page.

I hope you have read the attorney's ten-page defense of his attempted fraud for the $42 charge he places on the response.  He uses a lot of ink, but not a lot of think, and bills you $300 for each hour he spent crafting this fatally flawed memo.  Please turn your attention to p. 52 of your packets, the fee estimation sheet.  The memo says it will take a clerk two hours to scan 108 pages of transaction records, but this sheet says it will take two hours to retrieve those pages. 

The sheet has additional lines for fees for making copies of records, but contrary to the memo this sheet charges nothing for making copies.  As I showed you last time, retrieval of a folder takes a matter of seconds. 

The memo never addresses what would be FOIA exempt material found in these records, just says that the city is charging for 15 minutes of time to separate exempt materials, but no exempt material is claimed even in this lame defense.  Section 5(5) of the FOIA says the written notice of a partial denial of the record requested must contain an explanation of the basis under this act or other statute for the determination that the portion of that public record is exempt from disclosure, if that is the reason for denying a portion of the request.  This request was granted in full, an admission that there was no allowable FOIA exemption.  This claim for 15 minutes of labor to redact nothing is attempted fraud and public extortion.

Lastly, and most egregiously, Ross Sewage claims in his memo that the amount undefined under other charges was for fringe benefits of the clerk, which he claims is allowed under FOIA, and he is correct.  But look at the worksheet closer above the pay rates it's titled:  "Hourly pay including benefits amount".  Your public extortionist city attorney is trying to make me pay for the clerk's benefits twice for the two hours he says it takes for the retrieval of a folder.  He needs to be disciplined by this council for these continuing abuses of his authority targeted at the public to hide public records behind paywalls. [END comment]

Does anyone know why the same clerical assistants are paid $16.71 per hour for record retrieval and $18.19 for copying records, wouldn't you think they get the same amount for doing either?  I was thinking I might get an explanation when the next speaker was two-wage Jeanne "Hoax" Oakes who was elected to the city council by her peers in 2023 for a measly wage of $300 and then chosen by her councilor peers to be an interim city manager multiplying that wage by a factor of nearly 22 (2200% raise).  The city charter explicitly makes this illegal, but Mr. Ross Sewage said it was fine at the time, so the rest of the council didn't believe their lying eyes.

Jeanne Hoax:  (8:30 in):    "I am up to here (gestures to her forehead) with the juvenile name calling, insulting professional people, if I hear one more time: "We find things in folders.", we do but they're buried deeply in computer sheets, we don't keep things in folders anymore.  The time this takes, the money it takes is insane.  I'm so tired of the insults thrown at Ross when he has done such a marvelous job.  Our chief of police is the most wonderful individual who loves this community, and all the public hears are things tearing him down, and nothing is coming out publicly. 

He insults our mayor every... twice a week and I think it's time the public realizes... I think I represent the normal people in this community, which is 99% of the people who live here.  So I would take with a grain of salt this continuous barrage.  FOIA, charging for FOIA has been in effect for 20 years.  This is nothing new, and if you got lucky enough to not get charged, God bless you."

The Ludington Torch just hasn't been lucky or blessed by the almighty in getting grossly overcharged by Ross Sewage, who has bucked all sensible FOIA traditions made during the prior mayor and city manager in doing a marvelous job of fraud and public extortion over the last two years.   I would address Ms. Hoax during my second comment, but first we had to hear some Ross Sewage when the item came up for review.  

He didn't say anything about file folders or retrieval of records, indicated that the labor came from scanning (copying) the records but the original response indicated copying time was zero.  He would admit the exemption charge was speculative, in that he wasn't aware of any exemptions in the records, but FOIA fees are not assessed by speculation only for actual fees.  He would say that the benefits were not figured out twice, but the fee estimation worksheet determined that that was another lie.  

The problem is that the council has never taken their job as FOIA jurists seriously, and they have the same retributive mindset as Ms. Hoax-- getting triggered by a well-earned nickname onto one of their lawbreaking peers.  After a couple of non-probative questions asked from a myopic, non-empathic view of the issue at hand, the council unanimously rejected the appeal.  I would address this at the end of the meeting with my second public comment:

XLFD:  Thanks to Jeanne Hoax for her earlier opinion, someone who illegally became a city manager immediately after being a city councilor must be a great role model for you all.  

I pointed out three unlawful fees in my FOIA response:  being charged twice for fringe benefits, being charged for removing exemptions that were never claimed, and being charged the inflated labor cost of retrieval for what was instead an inflated labor cost of duplicating.  You approved all of those unlawful fees, following your lawyer's advice rather than the law and common sense.  You did this to thwart the public from looking in at the city's credit card purchases, showing gross misuse of the people's credit, unless they pay your fraudulent ransom. 

The bills section indicates that the city spent nearly $2500 (remember that number?!, your honor) on providing basic FOIA training for eleven or more officials including councilors by the police-training Rossow Group, where former MSP FOIA Coordinator Lori Hinckley is likely to have trained them.  To each councilor I sent a FOIA response where I was charged $550 for a couple of police body cams, each a few minutes in length, where I described in explicit detail what footage I wanted, all of the footage which would have been non-exempt if one is to believe the police report.  If your training was solid, you would know that the response I received was wrong in asking for such an amount-- and apparently that was conveyed to him, as I received those videos this afternoon at no cost.  

I am hopeful that city officials have learned that keeping public records from the people and from the media by establishing hefty, unlawful paywalls is not in our best interest. [END comment]

That afternoon I did receive for free two body cam videos that I was originally charged $550 for and told that it would take them three weeks to separate the exempt material out.  It's total bullshit, as their responsive videos (under ten minutes total) were prepared for me in about a week and would take a moron trained in video-editing less than ten minutes to review and determine there wasn't any substantive edits.  Our criminal city attorney and that "wonderful individual" Hoax references, whom I call the police thief, originally told me that it would take over nine hours of monkey-brained police Captain "Caveman" to perform such edits, as seen on their response:

The Ludington Torch won't stand for this anti-citizen fraud that the City of Ludington is perpetrating on everybody who requests public records and our elected city officials will not be receiving any respect, respect not earned when they look the other way when their fellow city officials commit fraud and public extortion.  They are accessories to crimes in our book and they will be called whatever bad names they deserve when their performance continues to be lacking respect for us who they supposedly represent.  

This can best be accented by the second one-man band I teased out earlier.  Jefferson Henry and other private marina owners and members of their family have been coming to meetings regularly over the last year with their own grievance, and Mr. Henry (10:00 into the video) would synthesize the crux of their legal arguments with a couple of documents handed out to the councilors and this reporter before the meeting started.  One was an executive reorganization order from 52 years ago which reorganized agencies.  The relevant part of that ERO 1973-2 was section three reproduced here:

Simplified, the Waterways Commission (WC) was reorganized as an advisory body to the NRC, and all of its past powers, duties, and operational resources were transferred to the DNR.  Nothing has been produced since that has contradicted that order, and yet over the six decades since the WC was made into a powerless advisory committee they have been operating with governmental authority and doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in resources, many of those dollars to the city's original public marina for maintenance and improvements.  Henry would also supply a 2012 memorandum from the attorney general's office (made by S. Peter Manning) to DNR Chief Ron Olson which would affirm the WC's advisory role. 

Olson still serves at that position, but the WC has continued to act beyond its advisory capacity and since Mr. Henry and others have pursued legal process to figure out the propriety of the WC doing non-advisory operational actions, they have recently received word from the current AG office representing the defendants that the WC is an operational public body.  This is kind of a big thing since it contradicts the 1973 ERO and the former AG memorandum but reflects the overall reality of how the WC has operated over six decades.  

The council has lacked basic empathy in this case as well, conflicted in their own way by being competitors against the private marinas and receiving millions from the WC over half a century in order to engage in grossly unfair competition against established city businesses.  Exasperated, he would compare his frustration with the city getting its act together with mine.  

But without the juvenile name-calling which Ms. Hoax says the Ludington Torch uses; however, we would beg to differ and claim that all of our epithets are used to identify the defective parts of our local system for the public's easier understanding.  For example:

LPD Police Thief Jones:  points out that he created an extralegal FOIA scheme to commit public extortion, and trains only supervisory staff to do clerical tasks in order to maximally charge requesters.

City Attorney Ross Sewage Hammersley:  points out his ethical conduct has been as dirty and crappy as raw sewage and is only getting less refined and smellier over time

Former Councilor Jeanne Hoax:  points out her illegal job switch that netted her a 22X pay raise.

Mayor Marx Barnett (alternatively Mark "of the beast" Barnett):  points out his Stalinist tendencies in promoting socialistic policies, alternatively his anti-Christ tendencies disguised thinly with false piety.  

If these people want to have better labels, our advice is that they should behave better in their roles as public servants.  Neither of these people seem to have the humility to address their shortcomings, and until they do, they need to learn to accept their sobriquet as the minimum price to pay. 

For love of money, they will assign patently illegal fees to FOIA responses, raise your taxes when the Headlee rolls the tax rates back, and accept millions from the Waterways Commission even when they are only an advisory committee.  And they don't want you to review their credit card purchases, spent in local taverns, on dog food, on trophies, funerary purchases, etc. unless you pay a ransom structured by unlawful fee schemes, forcing another costly trip to the circuit court to defend and highlight their iniquity.  

This is your current city government; it needs to be disrupted like what's happening at the federal level right now or else they will keep asking for more money from people for everything and keep accepting money unlawfully given them to by state agencies without having authority to give it away so that they can drown their private enterprise competition.

[Freedom Seeker]

X, you were doing on a local level what Elon Musk is doing on the national level in pointing out abuses of taxes and wrong doings long before most people heard of Elon.

And Jeanne Hoax: she must be fed up to her eyebrows with guilt of defying the constitution (Charter) of the City of Ludington to jump from being a Councilor to the City Manager in a night time. It is unfathomable that Hoaxs cannot see her wrong doing but this has been going on in the city cliche of "untouchables" at least 20 years and they cover each other's backs and think they are right (correct in their own eyes).

Mark Barnett has been a key player with an unbreakable ego in a game of trying to break you, X, to quit questioning their autocracy.
How dare you or anyone? Thanks again for exposing this Clowncil, the Mayorshit and the rest of the staff who get away with civil abuse of a public office.

I loved your second response to the exasperated Hoax. Has she no sense of right from wrong?

[XLFD]

Maybe I served as an inspiration for Elon Musk-- after all, look at what he renamed Twitter immediately after purchasing it, and if that wasn't enough of a homage, look at what he called his son (Little X).  

Ms. Hoax has a character flaw; she will never realize that her legacy will be forever tarnished by her inability to recognize that she broke the charter and did so for her financial well-being.  If she had accepted the interim city manager position and declared that she would do it for free (like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing at their public positions) she could have been a hero.  She was paid over $3000 for a two-week vacation during her time at that position and lied about it, saying she wasn't when the contract agreed to said she would be.  Now she's hanging out at council meetings acting like a mercenary sycophant, I wonder how much it's costing the taxpayers for her to do her latest job of polishing city official doorknobs.

I welcome such a person to decry my statements or my demeanor, because that's when I know that I'm doing things right.  It's the same thing at the national level, with Musk and Trump coming under fire for pointing out fraud and corruption.  Media and public officials that attack these two without any good reason, have zero credibility to me, just like any local public officials and media that attack me without good reason.

[Freedom Seeker]

Well said, X. I've thought on the x-connection. Probably most of the COL are not amused by Trump or Musk, seeing their past bad behavior which continues.

I forgot to mention my disgust in the new city attorney, not knowing the COL Charter and/or just blatantly brown-nosing to get paid. Is he orchestrating the FOIA fee fiasco or answering to Barnett/Jones who may think they can put an end to you? They hate the truth, they hate their autocracy questioned; therefore it seems they hate Democracy.