Regarding Hamlin Recall Rewrites

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Next Thursday, Mason County's Election Commission will hold a review hearing to determine whether the language used in two proposed recall petitions of Hamlin officials are factual and clear enough to proceed further in the process.  Hamlin citizen Greg Collins has revised the language of an earlier recall effort where the commission determined that the language was insufficiently clear for both targets and covered actions that happened before the term of Treasurer Susan Ptaszenski whose treasurer skills were called into question.  Trustee Johnaine Gurzynski was being recalled for her alleged release of confidential information. 

More than what you may need to know about the recall process can be found here.  A more detailed look at the particulars of this second recall effort can be found in this COLDNews article.  In this article we will preview the petitions and offer learned opinions of each petition, looking closer at the factuality of the claims and whether this effort has any modicum of success.  This humble reporter offers these views with the experience of being directly and indirectly involved with multiple recall efforts over the last five years and attending many meetings of the Hamlin Township Board over the last two years.

Recall of Treasurer Susan Ptaszenski

The above snippet shows precisely how the meat of the recall petition is for the treasurer.  Ptaszenski has been elected to the position starting back in 2012.  She has been criticized over the last couple of years for not using the online resources available for accounting and has been shown to be less than truthful over the years about her books matching up with the clerk's at township meetings, according to the audit mentioned made by Sarah Kanitz of Ludington, hired by the township for an extensive three year audit.  

While that audit uncovered a lot of imperfect practices and indicated that Ptaszenski and the former township clerk's accounting ledgers rarely matched with any precision, there was no indication that the treasurer had misplaced any funds or financially benefitted from same.  Since that audit, Hamlin Township has adopted many of the recommended suggestions offered by Kanitz, with Ptaszenski falling behind on the learning curve due primarily to her decades of reliance on using paper rather than computer bits for keeping track of things. 

While the language in this recall petition does concentrate only on an action taken during the current term starting on January 1st, 2025, it looks at what at first appears to be a major discrepancy between the bank reconciliation and Ptaszenski's in February 2025, the audit shows a comparison between the two reconciliations for the first three months of 2025

  

The discrepancy has been explained by Ptaszenski with Kanitz present as one that occurs sometimes over the course of transitioning from one month to another.  If one wants to be technical, the conciliations were off by about a factor 30% in February, but that was due to one or more entries being entered into the treasurer's ledger in March rather than February.  It was a clerical error that didn't amount to any sort of financial problem to the township, nor did it indicate any type of corrupt act, as an uninformed reader of the petition may assume.

The audit itself shows eleven poor accounting practices and procedures, five of which are in the milieu of the treasurer, one or more of these may have been a better choice to use rather than a one-time ledger discrepancy that amounted to nothing.  Clerk Sheila Genter has been writing verbatim minutes of meetings since early 2025 in which Ptaszenski has made some suspicious statements and stances against transparency and/or accountability that might be considered better worthy of recall than what is offered on the petition.

But even if the proposed petition were found to be non-opinion based and clear enough (which may be questionable, since he uses the abbreviation MMA for 'money market account' and follows it with the redundant word 'account'), what then?  For if the commission approves the language and somehow Collins and others get enough signatures to get a recall election held, are we to believe that one or more Hamlin residents with the skills needed to be a township treasure will run against Ptaszenski?  Why didn't they run in 2016, 2020, or 2024, when Ptaszenski was the sole candidate for Hamlin Treasurer?  

If there is no credible or credentialed candidate in the wings ready to take on the sitting treasurer in a recall election, the recall itself will have been a fool's errand and a waste of resources, only making Ptaszenski's existing electoral mandate stronger in the process.  

Recall of Trustee Johnaine Gurzynski

The language Collins uses on his petition for Gurzynski is a modest rework of his originally proposed petition which arises from an incident this reporter witnessed that presented no reasonable impropriety yet has blossomed into a disciplinary resolution passed by three members of the board and this recall petition.  When the resolution came up later, we observed what was evident by what was actually said and then falsely presented in the resolution:

"The board went into closed session on January 7th, according to the minutes of that meeting for the purpose of considering the consultation of the township attorney regarding a proposed consent agreement with Stix and Stones in the pending litigation, as allowed under MCL 15.268(1)(e).  The law restricts this session to make this the only material to be discussed about, and that the deliberation about the consent agreement would be the confidential part of this meeting. 

Recent precedent shows that otherwise non-confidential records used over the course of a closed session do not become confidential just because of their use.  Likewise, if a trustee were to reveal details of a closed session that were not part of the confidential material reviewed or discussed, they could do so without penalty.  The authorship of the site review plan drafted before Stix was rebuilt is not confidential and neither is where the attorney sat during the closed session. 

Gurzynski's disclosures cited in the censure did not need to be authorized as it was not part of the confidential information discussed or consulted about in the session, nor was any fiduciary duty of her as a trustee breached in any sense of the term.  

With neither of the primary censure statements being objectively true, making the secondary charges unsupported, the censure itself deserves its own censure for being fraudulent.  While Trustee Gurzynski's depiction of the site review plan appears to be based on a false representation of what may have been said at a closed session, it never was an unauthorized disclosure of confidential material.  The board majority did her wrong by claiming such in an official document passed without due diligence and effectively attempting to suppress the free flow of ideas in future meetings by Trustee Gurzynski." 

The above statement made by Gurzynski during public comment is what was stated, and so when we look at Collin's language, can we agree that no deliberations from that closed session was ever disclosed?  If you can't agree with this, please explain in the comments why the authors of a modified site plan are labelled confidential information-- especially in a closed session with the only confidential topic supposedly being deliberated about is settlement strategy, as seen in the minutes of the 1-7-2025 meeting:

That a majority of the board and Greg Collins would try to baselessly penalize Gurzynski for asking a legitimate question during public comment about the propriety/authorship of a site plan is concerning.  Once again, the action we are being told that happened in the petition is at best misleading, and at face-value, just false.

Yet we must remember that the factual basis being considered in a clarity hearing is primarily whether the language presented is clear of opinion, and so even when the premise is provably false, the language may be clear and 'factual' enough to be approved by the commission.  If that is the case, those who are asked to sign the petition should be made aware of the true facts.

Conclusion

At the clarity hearings taking place on April 21st starting at 8:30 AM, the election commission will diligently look at the two paragraphs presented to them and decide whether the language used is clear and devoid of opinion.  They may survive this step in the recall process.  If they have enough signatures filed and verified by the end of July, the recall election could happen this November.  

Passing this stage is the easy part, what will be hard is to get the signatures with what appears to be weak reasons to recall these officers and finding a valid alternative when none seem to be coming forward.  The last couple of elections have had the treasurer be unopposed, with Gurzynski getting the most votes each time over the other trustee running.  Both members of the ski team have their own brand of populist appeal which would find them likely winning in a contested recall election if they wanted to keep their seat.

Facing a recall effort is a big hit on the ego of an elected official, however, even if an election never materializes.  Following the successful recalls of the Bleaus out in PM Township, recall efforts in Scottville and Ludington that never saw a recall election as an end result did make a difference.  In the six recall efforts initiated, the targeted official did not seek reelection for their seat in the next regular election.

In Hamlin, there is no indication that either of the two sides that have evolved over the last couple of years have all of the answers.  It would be a shame to see the recall mechanism used in an effort to silence the voice of the minority, especially when the reasons for the recall are so lame.