The Place Where Ludington Talks
Ludington City Council Meetings: April and May 2025 Redux
Our loyal readers have likely noticed that the Ludington Torch failed to put out a straight recap of Ludington City Council meetings over the last two months, even though we were in attendance. We have been abnormally busy, but the reason why we weren't able to supply these summaries was the initial lack of a video for the first meeting in April. We always try to include a video with our recaps, but for some reason, we would never find this within the first week of the first April meeting after the night it was simulcasted, and it's still nowhere to be found.
After the next meeting, we resolved to do a recap covering the prior meeting too, but it was a daunting task without the prior video and another council meeting coming up in just one week, and so it continued; apparently it was tough to keep up for the city too, since as of this writing, they have failed to put out minutes for the second April and May meeting or the packet for the first May meeting.
For completeness' sake and the need to provide Ludington citizens with the best recap of these meetings, the LT now takes on the daunting chore of summarizing these four meetings without overwhelming the network. We present the agenda packets, the meeting's video, and the minutes (when available), along with LT articles based on something that happened at those meetings, but didn't cover that meeting in whole.
April 14: Storming Council Chambers
Related content: Privacy Duality of the LPD, and Vanishing Gazebo
Summary/Analysis: The best reason to explain why the video of this meeting is lost to the public is that eight citizens got up during the first comment period to air eight different grievances, including: why was the Cartier gazebo demolished, why is city promoting alcohol (four variants), why is the city accepting state funds illegally dispensed, why is the city apathetic on blight issues, and my concern about the FOIA appeal I had, when Mayor Mark "Marx" Barnett had a meltdown near my conclusion:
XLFD: "I have frequently asked the city council to suspend their normal legislative duties in order to become a judicial panel for FOIA appeals and they always seem to suspend any concept of being fair and judicious by the way they conduct their proceeding. Case in point from this February when they considered an appeal by allowing the city attorney to present his argument for twenty minutes while offering me no time whatsoever to state my case, which is now going before the circuit court.
This time around, I appeal a FOIA response of a video with multiple edits included thereon that are not legally supported. Throughout the video, black edit squares are placed over the side of Joe Oquist's porch to assert some modicum of his privacy, fortunately not covering the police assault and brutality that ensued that night where Captain My Caveman collapsed Joe's lung by doing his best Derek Chauvin impersonation. I shared the video with my appeal, I indicated that the redactions were illegal in that they were exterior views of Oquist's enclosed back porch, visible from public sidewalks, public streets, and public alleys. I included a picture to show that the edited-out material did not fall under the aegis of being a "private place" where privacy is expected.
One can look at the city's assessor site and review thousands of pictures featuring the exterior of Ludington's homes and their porches, including each of yours. No black squares there. The street level feature of Google maps shows private residences without any black squares over their exterior. I have been receiving police videos from LPD before crooked Thief Jones and Ross Sewage started perverting FOIA...
Mayor Marx: "Mr. Rotta, Mr. Rotta...
XLFD: My turn...
Marx: You'll get it. What I'm asking you to do is to refrain from name-calling. Just call people, address people as how you would want to be addressed. I appreciate that, thank you.
XLFD: Before crooked Thief Jones and Ross Sewage started perverting FOIA...
Marx: Mr. Rotta
XLFD: ...and never have they covered the exterior of the house...
Marx: MR. ROTTA! You need to stop with the name calling. You can carry on, but that is not going to be a part of it. If not, we will move on to somebody else.
XLFD: Before crooked Thief Jones and Ross Sewage started perverting FOIA and never have they covered the exterior of a house with a black square before this. Were this council to follow the attorney's advice in his memo, they would not only be going against decades of rulings from the Michigan Supreme Court that indicate FOIA is a pro-disclosure statute where exemptions claimed by the public body are to be narrowly construed...
Marx: Time, time.
XLFD: Let me finish my sentence... whenever possible, but they would also be encouraging (gavel banging incessantly) another FOIA lawsuit...
Marx: Mr. Rotta, you're done.
XLFD: ...to be launched against them.
The mayor states before each comment period that he will allow the speaker to finish the sentence they are on when time runs out, but with this reporter, he interrupts frequently and never allows me to finish the sentence I am on, which apparently is his goal, as we see throughout these meetings. This isn't the case with others who comment, even those who are otherwise critical.
The meeting started with the city attorney (Ross Sewage Hammersley) defending the city's hiring of State Representative VanderWall's company once again for services and how he thought it did not violate the state constitution, even when they rejected a lower competitive bid in the past. They then accepted new FOIA fees introduced by him so as to help justify one of the issues involved in a past FOIA fee dispute that is currently in litigation. After renewing six service contracts, they approved spending $206K on four new vehicles and $33K in 'fish coolers' for the city's fish cleaning stations. These were late add-ons to the agenda.
One of two issues of controversy were my aforementioned FOIA appeal. After a bit of discussion, the council voted 6-1 to deny the appeal, with Councilor Jack Bulger correctly noting that the outside of a porch able to be seen from multiple public places does not fall within the privacy exemption, with the big admission by Ross Sewage that he never even reviewed the redacted footage, despite writing a nine-page defense of the exemption used and saying repeatedly that it was from inside of the porch when it wasn't. An attorney this careless is a liability to the city, and that will be showed once again after more litigation.
The other controversy was the expansion of the social district, which also passed with a 6-1 vote, Councilor Mike Shaw correctly indicating that this was an unholy relic of the COVID era that didn't have the support of most businesses. The rest of the council went against public sentiment to side with the beer and liquor distributors who hold a lot of discrete power in the community.
The last comment period would feature four more poignant comments. Jeff Henry wanted the city to review and audit what happened with Harbor View and the condos when those projects started, Tom Sanders would suggest that invasive plants appear to have been introduced by contractors replacing lead pipes, and Daniel Jensen cautioned them to think about their financial situation when/if grant money dries up due to what's happening nationally. I would start waving the Torch first:
XLFD: "Amazing that this council acting as jurists would look at a video where one of their town's business owners had almost all of his civil rights taken from him by the LPD and decide that the exterior of his back porch deserved a special right to privacy never before seen in a court of law.
I brought up a couple of issues at the last meeting, one was addressed by the city manager at the end, saying that two $8000 charges attributed to FOIA work by the city attorney were coding errors, yet failed to point out why the city council passed the paying of the bills without correcting these errors after I notified all officials about them before that action, nor why the city was effectively paying two months of legal bills once again when the City Attorney Agreement says Ross Sewage will be billing the city monthly and the city will be paying such bills promptly, making a two month payment at one meeting an indication that someone broke the agreement. Explain that away.
Then there was city official Melissa Reed using the city's taxpayer-paid credit card to buy $76 of food from her husband's restaurant for a ZBA meeting. I asked at the last meeting if the city manager thought that was proper, she remained mute, so I expect she will take the same tact when I make the observation that two of the city's so-called enterprise funds purchased $160 of merchandise from Safety Decals, an enterprise partially owned by Community Development Director Heather Tykoski. Citizens should be confident that their public officials are not benefitting directly or indirectly from their public service beyond their established salary and benefits. In Ludington, we don't, because this stuff continues to happen unabated. [END comment]
April 28: Murky Waters
Related content: LPD Drunk with Power?, and Raw Sewage Records
Summary Analysis: Councilor John Terzano was absent and five people addressed the council during the first period. Pastor Bryan Ford led off with a small lecture on gentle speech and civility, that was later ignored by the mayor, former interim city manager Jeanne Oakes would request a week in spring for leaf collection by the city for years like this when the snow started falling before the leaves did in the prior year.
Jeff Henry and Ray Karboske would bring up their issues centering on the PM Bayou, public marinas and the Waterways Commission, but also addressing overdue FOIA responses and past sewage dumps. My comment also crossed over into related topics they introduced:
XLFD: (18:00 in) "I formally want to thank Jack Bulger for being the sole advocate for reason at last meeting's FOIA appeal, when he was the only one amongst you who realized that the outside of an enclosed porch viewed at night that one can see from the public street, sidewalk, and alley had no personal privacy rights to enable the FOIA Coordinator, Ross Sewage, to redact it from a body cam video. Ross Sewage never even viewed the video to see the unlawful redactions, just cost the city hundreds of dollars in attorney fees to write up a couple dozen pages of untruths as to the facts of the appeal.
I bring this up again as I can't help but see that there are ten pictures of houses in your packets beginning on page 73. These are daytime pictures so you can actually see inside the windows of the houses and you see enclosed front porches and undraped bedroom windows, and one has to wonder, why are you sharing these pictures with the public without covering them with black squares, like you did with the body cam footage when your police department went postal on a business owner?
On Thursday, April 17th, I sent a FOIA request to get to the bottom of why the City covered up a raw sewage leak on April 7th and bypass pumped untreated wastewater into the PM Lake for a day. A response to that request was due at the end of last Friday, but I have received nothing as of today, not even a notice of extension. That is a violation of the law, as is knowingly pumping raw sewage into a public waterway. But all I ever see in front of me is officials patting each other on the back and telling each other how good of a job they are doing. False, all you guys are doing is arguing over busy work, like this park smoking ordinance.
Kudos to Jeff Henry and the Pere Marquette Lake Watershed Council, who have uncovered evidence of other polluters of our lake, significant leakage from a chemical company's prismatic holding ponds that infiltrate into what should be a pristine PM Lake. And your main worry is smoking at the beach." [END comment]
I was interrupted two minutes in by the attorney after indicating his response was late, which led to the mayor interrupting me when I asked Ross Sewage whether he had anything to say about it. So much for civility. The city would adopt a resolution to support having an invasive species management plan that effectively outsourced the problem to contractors from afar, approve a new assessing contract, which would actually save money due to getting rid of an already outsourced service, and approve a few other items. As for the controversial but insubstantial ordinance for smoking in parks, they passed it 5-1, with Councilor John Kreinbrink being the outlier and marking the third time in two meetings that the one vote against a measure was the most proper.
Pastor Brian Ford would once again preface the second comment period, citing Ephesians 4:32 in order to make the rest of public comment kinder and gentler, but it didn't work all that well. Jeff Henry would remind the city of their past sewage dumps in 2008 and 2012 and their impotence in getting the DNR chief to come and address multiple questions about the Waterways Commission, the DNR, and the maintenance/creation of the city's two public marinas.
XLFD: (1:43:30 in) "At the last meeting, John Long brought up questions about what happened with the Cartier Park Gazebo, and he was never given a very good answer by city administration. Gazebo-gate only became more pronounced after the April 22nd meeting of the Parks Committee, where the agenda showed the gazebo's demolition or roof repair was still a topic for future discussion weeks after the demo, while Chairman Stibitz and Mike Shaw acknowledged in the meeting notes that the gazebo issue never was up for discussion at the committee before someone in the city took full authority and spent an unknown amount of the taxpayer's money to demolish the gazebo. The talk at this meeting moved to replacing the gazebo, now that roof repair is off the table following the demolition.
Like the bypass pumping of raw sewage into PM Lake, someone took the authority upon themselves to do this demolition. Is our new city manager so unwilling to heed the public she supposedly serves by polluting our lakes and tearing down our salvageable park structures without going through proper procedures? She has the power to put out public alerts on the city website and social media outlets when she takes the initiative to put tainted wastewater into our waterways and make her own demolition contracts, spending money without even this council's knowledge. If she wasn't responsible for these two abuses of authority, then who exactly is running this city? It definitely is not the people and their elected representatives acting within the law." [END comment]
With an extra ten seconds, I asked the city attorney whether he could explain why he thought that he was not late with the city's FOIA response, but he would only indicate that he sent it out earlier that afternoon, and that it wasn't late. I had to address this legal error at the next meeting.
May 5: Cheri in Charge
Related content: Slick Talkers
Councilor Cheri Stibitz would be mayor for a day, as Mayor Barnett would be absent and she was the mayor pro tem; Councilor Shaw would also be absent for this meeting without a lot of business on the agenda. The main item under consideration was a short-term rental (STR) ordinance that gave the downtown district more ability to be denser for STRs than other areas and a resolution that adjusted the fee schedule in favor of the city, naturally. Otherwise, various short-term contracts were awarded.
The spice of this meeting came with the public comments, with Jeff Henry airing what should come as no surprise that the holding ponds used by Dow were leaking into the lake at substantial levels and much of the research done on that (at the selling of that property back around 2008) was summarily repressed by the city led by one of that company's highest officials, John Henderson, who was mayor through 2013 and still serves as fire chief. He comments right after I would speak about another FOIA appeal based on unlawful redactions.
XLFD: (8:00 in) "I advanced a FOIA appeal to the council regarding an over-redacted police report last Tuesday, so I don't know why the appeal didn't make the agenda. I did appear at court this morning and contacted the man who was arrested by the LPD for public intoxication and tried to figure out with him what was left off of the police report that the chief had claimed was unduly invasive of his personal privacy. As a defendant, he received an unredacted copy of the police report through discovery and I can tell you that the redactions made in narrative of the amended response do not seem to be allowable under FOIA.
Three statements were made, one by the arrestee and two by his wife, those were all redacted in my FOIA response. The report indicates that they were voluntary statements made to the police without prompting or coercion by either Officer Murphy or Morris. Other than contact information, why would someone volunteer information to a police officer of a personal nature that would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of that individual's or their spouse's privacy? And if the information was of that nature, and not relevant to the arrest, why was it included in the police report in the first place?
The biggest problem is not that the city is violating FOIA once again in its endeavor to be above the law in terms of keeping vital public information secret, please witness their cover-up when they had the sewer main rupture, absolutely nothing about it on their website and social media to alert the public even after you all were all told of it that afternoon. The biggest problem is that there is no state law against public intoxication, and this man was arrested solely because the Murphy and Morris M&M team forced him, a person on private property, to take a PBT to affirm his intoxication. Public intoxication is not a state crime, it is a local crime that never gets enforced in our expanding social districts.
A federal court determined twenty-two years ago that having Michigan pedestrians take PBTs requires a search warrant if consent is not explicitly granted. The report indicates consent was never granted. Thief Jones and the predatory LPD should be less involved in preserving privacy rights that just aren't there and instead focused more on preserving Fourth Amendment rights of those they unlawfully arrest and incarcerate. [END comment]
They would vote later to suspend the appeal to the next meeting as the city attorney had not prepared his defense as the appeal was made on the prior Thursday. The business went through without much discussion and the meeting's second comment period saw Jeff Henry further explaining the extent of the PM Lake contamination and the prowess of the DEQ toxicologist who made significant findings by 2009 of the extent of the local pollution which has yet to be mitigated. Daniel Jensen would add that adding fluorides to water at the treatment plant was not wise as more news of fluoridation comes out. In between those observations, I looked at three issues:
XLFD: "One week ago, Ross Sewage explained precisely how he messed up my FOIA request for the city's raw sewage records. The records show I sent my email on Thursday, April 24, and that by law the city received my request that Friday. The city had five business days from that Friday: Monday thru Friday of the next week, five more business days, to respond and they didn't-- he admitted he sent me the response three days late on last Monday afternoon. He stated by example that if a request was sent by email on Monday that it wouldn't be due until the following Tuesday. Ergo, a request sent on Thursday would be due at the end of the next Friday. He disproves himself.
As for the new business hours, understand that even if city hall is open for a half day on Friday or even if our employees are taking the whole day off on a whim, that is still one business day as defined by state law. I took an anonymous online poll of area citizens, and 69% of those with an opinion disapproved of the new business hours. One can see why city officials love the new hours, when you reduce city office services by three hours each week and try to market it as an improvement made for the public's sake, but the public overall is not stupid. They see exactly what you are doing, raising taxes through your votes each of the last two summers by $200,000 per year each time, just so city officials can provide three hours less of services each week and have a longer weekend.
By the way, the raw sewage records shows that the city manager contacted each of you on the afternoon of the raw sewage leak on April 7th, but she neglected to tell the public on social media or on the city's website that the city was bypass pumping raw sewage into PM Lake,
while our illustrious city newspaper reported erroneously on a "water main crisis" two days after the fact. [END comment]
Councilor Stibitz did a fair job as mayor, but she curtly stopped me midpoint during my last sentence, at the last comma before I could critique the COLDNews, and refused to let me finish the sentence. They don't follow their own rules. Why do they always explain the fiction of allowing all citizens to finish their sentence when they repeatedly stop me from doing just that?
May 19: The Great Gaslighter
Related content: Barnett's Gaslighting Campaign
While the LT focused on the mayor's gaslighting efforts at the end of the meeting in the link above, gaslighting was apparent throughout the rest of the meeting, and has been the city's way of suppressing the comments of citizens over this full two-month period, whether it's my FOIA appeals, Henry's pleas to do the right thing, or the city's questionable actions, like their boat recovery, sewage bypass pumping, vanishing gazebo, etc. One can see why they would try to craft anti-smoking ordinances in order that there wouldn't be an explosion with all that gas hanging around.
Jeff Henry would lead off the comment period of this meeting with all of the officials attending other than Ross "Sewage" Hammersley, introducing a resolution he had drafted at no charge for the consideration of the council. And while the minutes would actually reflect what was on the proposed resolution after his second comment, where he offered more support, none of the councilors would try to champion the cause-- which would simply show the council's support for DNR Chief Ron Olson to come to town and answer some questions truthfully about his agency and its ongoing policies.
My comment's request was more modest, asking for the council to repudiate the arbitrary redactions made in a police report by Police Thief Chris Jones. When one looks at the city attorney's memo backing the redactions, it seems obvious that he never reviewed what was actually redacted, just like he did with the prior FOIA appeal. What was crazier was that when the original packet came out, the memo actually recommended disclosure of the records, but apparently Jones made some calls and by Monday, a few words were changed as did the recommendation, which means quite a lot to the sheep-filled council who defer legal issues to the Traverse City fee-chaser.
XLFD: "A funny thing happened over the weekend. On Friday night, I read a memorandum from Rossss to the council recommending that they provide the redacted part of the record which is what my FOIA appeal is about. His presumption then was that I had seen the redacted part of that report supplied to the improperly arrested man through discovery. Over the weekend, a city official contacted the man and his wife and they were told that they didn't know who I was. This is true, I did not contact either of those parties, I made contact with his attorney on his hearing date, where he was late or never showed. I asked questions about this police report that the city is unlawfully hiding parts of and received answers from her.
She did nothing unethical, but your attorney's quick change of heart shows that he wants to do something unethical. There is nothing in the police report suggesting why this man was arrested for the crime he is charged with. I am trying to understand why he was arrested, the city is hiding information that two separate officers put on this report echoing voluntary statements the man and his wife made that were supposedly relevant to the case. Training on writing police reports indicate that in the narratives you should never add information of a potentially invasive, intimate, or embarrassing personal nature unless it has direct relevance to an arrest or investigation.
I am on the understanding that each councilor has a copy of the redacted and the full report, so you can be the judge for those three redactions under dispute and apply the two prong test. Can it be considered “intimate,” “embarrassing,” “private,” or “confidential.”, then it passes the first prong, if it's not, it's releasable. For the second prong, it is necessary to ask whether the requested information would shed light on the governmental agency’s conduct or further the core purposes of FOIA. The available report minus the redactions fails to support a needed element of the public intoxication section of the city code, that the man was endangering the safety of himself or others. If any of those statements were included to support the arrest rationale in any way, then they need to be disclosed. The courts say: “[W]e cannot hold our [police] officials accountable if we do not have the information upon which to evaluate their actions.” [END comment]
When this was considered later on, the councilors never analyzed any of the three statements (even discretely) or tried to apply the test, they just unanimously decided to ignore any kind of judicial review. They offered no reason as to why they would all be added to the report if the uncoerced statements had no bearing on the charge or why trained officers would violate report-writing protocols. Nor did they explain why the unprincipled city attorney would do a 180 on his memo recommendation simply because he was gambling on whether I had actually saw the unedited report.
During the meeting, Leveaux Park was recognized on its 100 year anniversary, prefaced with a presentation on the park by Ned Nordine. They would approve receiving a grant from the MI DNR for about $1.5 million to replace the A Dock at Harbor View Marina.
XLFD: "When the City approved the LPD's K-9 unit in January 2024, it was determined that the K-9 Fund of the FOLP would be solely responsible for the medical expenses of the city's police dog. You all approved the paying of the bills which included the chief using the credit card he was entrusted with to pay for $2500 in medical expenses at the Animal Hospital. You have all violated the state constitution, Article 7, Section 26, which simply states: "no city shall have the power to loan its
credit for any private purpose". Funding medical expenses for the K-9 was a private purpose, as assigned by your January 2024 vote, using the city's credit card to pay medical expenses was therefore unconstitutional, and you all should be ashamed of your violation of the oaths you made to that document by allowing the police thief to use his credit card unlawfully.
That wasn't Thief Jones only act of pilfering during the last two weeks; as harbormaster, he is given some authority over boats that sink in PM Lake under section 66-32 and 33 of the city code. He has the power to remove a sunken vessel and hold it until costs for recovering it are paid. I've seen the invoice for recovering a boat that sunk during the winter, it totals over $20,000. Crane services, transportation and storage costs seem unbelievably steep at over $16,000 and unjustified on the receipt. But what bothers me more is that the city bills $1500 for administration fees and $1400 for PD and DPW services in an attempt to apparently get city officials paid over and above what their wages are and above what those code sections permit, which is actual costs and expenses for boat removal. Consider, a DPW or PD employee will get paid the same whether they sit around (interruption by mayor)...
and watch a crane for six hours as when they do something more useful during those six hours. [END comment]
Once again, I was brusquely and impolitely cut off midsentence. While I could go through the 29 months of council meetings where others were routinely able to go beyond the allotted time to finish the sentence they were on, or even more, I would need go no further than the last speaker of this meeting, former Councilor Les Johnson, who was allowed to comment 40 seconds beyond when the timer went off. In the video, you can see me gesture with a hook shortly after the timer goes off, and then point at my imaginary wristwatch for the rest of the time to remind the council of their own rules which they never applied to Johnson, yet rudely enforce on this reporter.
Apologies for this late recap, we will strive to be punctual in the future and run with timely articles even if the city hides the recording of the meeting.
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