Ludington City Council, December 8, 2025 meeting: What has Possessed Them?

[XLFD]

The December 8, 2025 had the potential to be a powder keg, with the Ludington Torch noticing and publishing a dirty little secret not seen on the agenda, not discussed in detail at committee, and hidden away in the packet:  the rental inspection fees were being dramatically raised (registration fees by more than a factor of eight) and a broadening of the Rental Inspection Program (RIP) to include hotels, motels, and B&Bs.  

Seven folks told the council their concerns over this topic with me starting the charge with a spirited discussion which followed the normal invocation and Daniel Jensen extemporaneously quoting scripture that promoted freedom and prosperity.  These were excellent lead-ins to my comment, which expressed concerns for the very souls of the city officials arrayed in front of me:

XLFD: (14:30 in) "We are blessed to have our area's religious leaders come here each meeting for an invocation, but what we really need is for one to come here and perform an exorcism, because I fear that our city leaders are possessed by demonic forces.

This is not hyperbole, what entity other than demon spawn would introduce a resolution that raises rental registration fees by 840%, and introduce illegal searches and fees onto motels, hotels, and B&Bs who are specifically excluded from the rental inspection program established by ordinance?  Why would any elected public official sit by and let the city manager they appointed depict an extortion scheme in this venue saying that they will keep AndyS from opening unless they finance the installation of a protected bike lane on Rath Avenue?  Maybe it's because they all carry demon seeds.

And who else other than the bewitched and the devil-ridden would sell cemetery plots purchased by a local family's matriarch out from under her.  She paid for those lots, made a covenant with the city, and the city broke that contract.  Even Satan abides by contracts.  What we've seen over these last two meetings is the city compounding their act of administrative grave robbery by making an heir fight for information that would help him understand why the city violated their own policy and state law to desecrate the family plot.

How many tens of thousands of dollars is the city spending on defending their past dishonorable and unlawful acts of attempted extortion and tomb raiding, and why are you all active participants, going into closed session to devise evil schemes and denying FOIA requests to hide your duplicity, rather than resigning because you refuse to participate in such demonic rituals?  Does your oath of office or the preservation of your soul mean nothing to you?"  [END comment]

While it may have actually been more hyperbole rather than a papal edict, it's not a stretch to think that this city council is under the control of sinister forces.  Those forces may be more linked to earthly power, influence or wealth factors, but the dedication to whatever is possessing them seems near absolute.  They are not working for the regular taxpayer, homeowner, tenant, and business owner in Ludington, and it seems like they have sold their everlasting soul to someone-- and this is terrible because they lost their mind about three years ago.

Jennifer Griffis, Tom Bogner, Mitch Bogner, Rob Nelson, Melissa Magee Boggs, and Kurt Chavalia followed with their own concerns about the raises and its effects on the local housing market.  Their main points:  the rate hike will only make the affordable housing crisis worse, rising costs will fall on the tenants, no notification to landlords/tenants about the fee hikes, no dialog with the affected parties, many tenants will not be able to afford the added cost as they are already paying too much of their paycheck for rent already.

The city council would wisely table and postpone the proposed resolution to a later council meeting, even suggesting that they may look for input before they decide anything.  They noted a committee meeting would be held at 4 PM the next day.  That meeting was convened, and while several of these landlords would show up, they would be told by Chair John Terzano (who, with Councilor Cheri Stibitz, were absent at the council meeting) that the council tabled the measure, so that there was nothing further they could do at that level.  

Four business days have passed and there is nothing on the city's website or social media pages asking for input or even suggesting different rates.  We would hear from the building department head, Heather Tykoski, before the meeting, but all she had to add was a bunch of babble that we refuted immediately here.  Raising fees 840% for a service where the costs of providing that service does not rise more than 5% makes the hike an obvious tax, a revenue producer that is unlawful in this circumstance.

The agenda packet would indicate there was more to this meeting than a brazen yet hidden attempt to attack local businesses.  Kristi Zimmerman would lead off the meeting with a presentation on multi-use trails in the area (p. 20 for details), four routes shown below, three of which are in the city limits in part.  The council would pass a resolution supporting the vision, which will start looking for grants in 2026 for the first phase.

The rest of the business involved approving a 5 year lease of the city's postage machine by ordinance, then the first readings of ordinances that would set the salaries for the clerk and treasurer for 2026.  

This would give a good indication of pay raises that we were told nothing about in the 2026 Budget presentation offered by City Manager Prevaricatin' Kaitlin Aldrich over the course of last month, nor were there any indications in the budget itself about how big the raises would be.  In these two elected officials, the clerk's salary went up 4% ($80,874 to $84,109) the treasurer's salary went up 6% ($58,656 to $62,200).  In the city's current dark pattern of acting, one can only find the current salaries by looking at last year's ordinances.  The rolling inflation rate over the last year was almost 3%.

One should expect large pay raises when all city officials keep mum as to where all of that extra tax money is going that they have been raising.  When the rolling inflation rate over the last ten years is compared to the city's rolling revenue increase over that same period, the revenues finish 25% over the inflation rate.  This is what you get when you raise taxes over the inflation rate every summer, as the city does in its lust for more and more of everyone else's hard-earned money.  

City leaders were equally silent about how much they were charging for a FOIA request submitted by Terry Grams in order to find out why the City of Ludington violated multiple policies and ethical standards in selling off his family's plots at Lakeview Cemetery.  In about twelve minutes of discussion beginning at 1:34:40 into the meeting, City Attorney Ross "Sewage" Hammersley would bring out the usual narratives for fee appeals, but nothing very specific in saying that possibly non-existent records since 1960 would take a while to look for and process.  

FYI, the amount requested for fulfilling the FOIA request was over $2700 and was all calculated at the rate of the city clerk taking weeks of time to filter through cemetery records to see how often the city violated its own policies and sold off cemetery plots that they shouldn't have.  Any assistant clerk should be able to do this clerical work at half the cost, and it shouldn't take more than a day to do if the older records have any semblance of organization to them. 

Later in the week, Grams offered to come in person and inspect the records he requested, and he has yet to receive a response.  Since he would be doing the clerk's work, they should be able to train a camera on him (for security of the records) and let him go at it.  They won't though, because they indicated at this meeting that they could have used the exemption they used the meeting before, the one where they cannot fulfill a FOIA request to someone they are in litigation with.  

The item they would spend most of their time in the meeting on was whether to expand art along the Cartier Park pathway.  Those who use this pathway have seen three glass-covered pieces of art over the last couple of year, the local art center (LACA) wants to make it five.  After a lot of discussion where several councilors thought that three was enough, they took no action and thus kept it at three, but with the hope that the artwork could be traded out twice as often.

The second public comment had Mitch Bogner, Jordan Webster, Melissa Boggs, and Annette Quillan thank the council for not acting rashly and reconsidering the fees, with the consensus being that they either wanted the bad landlords targeted better or the good landlords incentivized, like some officials mentioned during the discussion.  That's a good plan, but without a clear objective definition of what a "bad or good landlord" is, it isn't a good idea to put into policy.  Kurt Chavalia would wonder about the fuzzy math that would see the RIP go $120,000 in debt in two years, and of course that would not be clarified in a program that has regularly posted surpluses.

This reporter would mention one of the FOIA appeals that was originally on the agenda, but removed, and the courtroom drama I had observed earlier that day and wrote about here.  I would see two other preliminary exams on Wednesday that were almost as bad as regards the LPD and their officers, I hope to chronicle them shortly, as it helps show a pattern.  I did lay off the exorcism language, even though they hadn't shown much over the course of the meeting to think that they weren't taken over by diabolical forces:

XLFD: (1:57:10 in) "One of the courthouse's security officers made a comment that I'm there almost as often as he is, and he's somewhat right.  Over the last 14 months, I've been arraigned three times for three separate specious crimes under the city code devised by the LPD and taken up by your contracted prosecutor who is obsessed with me for some reason.  But while this has wasted my time, it has allowed me to hear a lot of other malicious prosecutions initiated by the LPD by networking with others. 

I've written about some, including that involving one of your FOIA appeals, Semaj Palmer, who had his car unlawfully impoundment by LPD.  Sergeant Mendez' testimony only seemed to affirm that they had targeted Palmer, illegally stole his car, and illegally prevented Palmer from accessing his own property before the theft.  

I will be writing about what I saw earlier today with a domestic violence complaint handled by Sergeant Versluis.  The prosecution failed to bring much of a case against the woman involved, bringing the male "victim" who was under felony probation, to offer self-contradictory testimony.  He would lose his temper on the stand.  The mother of three who took the homeless man in was able to show substantial bruising on her arms and leg from where she was allegedly pushed over a filing cabinet, but she was the one charged with a crime.  She took the stand and gave credible testimony, showed pictures of her bruising taken after her overnight in the local jail, because they just weren't interested in listening to her, just like the police chief, according to her testimony.  

Thanks once again for giving me the opportunity to bring awareness of these cases by engaging in lawfare on me. [END comment]

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump gave us all one valuable lesson when he declared his candidacy for president back in 2023 and became almost immediately besieged with truly baseless civil and criminal lawsuits.  These lawsuits only give me more kinetic inertia to show how far off the course the local police and prosecutor are, and my eventual exoneration and counterplay in the face of bogus criminal charges will only be part of my victory as time progresses.  If paid public officials can do this to me, you know they are screwing over other people, and not just other political targets. 

When officials, whether they are law officers or prosecutors, use the legal system to go after so many inarguably innocent people, is it so hard to believe that demons are in control of them?  What we really need to do is repossess them if an exorcism is out of the question.   

[AnxiousGuy]

Just a reminder they don’t mention on Fox News. Donald Trump was found guilty of rape in 2023 by a federal jury consisting of 9 citizens. The case was brought by the woman he raped.

[XLFD]

The reason why you don't find it on Fox News, or any other reputable news organization, is that your statements just aren't true.  Hopefully, you trust the Associated Press as a reliable source, they reported just after this verdict came in:

"The verdict was split: Jurors rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped, finding Trump responsible for a lesser degree of sexual abuse."

I'm sorry to say it, but once again you're a victim of fake news and leftist hyperbole.  You also should understand that this was a civil trial where the burden of proof is merely a preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt and the penalty would only be financial. 

Regardless, these charges appeared 23 years after "the fact" in a memoir of E Jean Carroll, during Trump's first term where (surprise) it helped bolster her sales.  If there is evidence that these two even met or were in the same place back in 1996 it's just not there, she is the only one to say so.  

And before you can say "Fox News", realize I don't even have access to that network on my Smart TV, and before you label me a Trump disciple, recognize that I would defend my fiercest political enemy if similar charges with the same fact set came out against them.  You don't label someone a rapist when they have just been declared civilly liable for sexual abuse and absolved of rape; it's called being fair.

[AnxiousGuy]

Spin it how you like. The jury did not find him guilty of the definition of rape that they were instructed to follow. In Trumps failed attempt to sue the victim for defamation, it was found that he digitally raped her. The term rape can be used to describe his attack with no recourse on his part because he was in fact found guilty of rape.

[AnxiousGuy]

OJ Simpson was only found liable in civil court as well. So was OJ Simpson found guilty of murder or not? You can move the goalposts all you want but the word rape and murder have been used in court to describe both offenders.

[XLFD]

No spin needed, Trump was never found guilty of rape as you're continuing to say, and especially your original claim:  " Donald Trump was found guilty of rape in 2023 by a federal jury consisting of 9 citizens." is factually wrong as the record shows.

One can be convinced enough that OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife and her friend to call him a murderer, but it doesn't erase the fact that he was acquitted of the crime of murder by a jury of his peers.  Simpson's civil case is an excellent example showing how the same set of facts can win in a civil setting, especially with a weaker charge of 'wrongful death'.

In Simpson's cases, you had a fresh crime scene and a whole lot of evidence, in the E Jean Carol case you have the word of one woman who doesn't strike me as credible (more like creepy), even in all of those softball interviews done outside of Fox News. 

[AnxiousGuy]

11 witnesses testified with some saying that around the time of the “Sexual assault or digital rape” (pick your terminology) they were told what happened. You can be a skeptic all you want but the jury, convicted him based on the whole picture presented at trial. Does your skepticism stem from being a bias diehard supporter and lack of being at the trial to hear these witnesses? Just the interviews you claim to have watched that in your own mind clear him of this conviction?

[XLFD]

AG, why don't you ever get your facts straight and just put out fake news?  I presume you believe Politico's account of what happened at the civil trial, and you are right that there were eleven witnesses, but of the ten who were not EJC, only two (Martin and Birnbach) indicate that they were told anything after the alleged assault occurred.  

My "bias" is towards the rights of the accused and towards the truth.  

[stump]

It seems AG suffers from DTS

[AnxiousGuy]

It’s funny you mention TDS because it’s the GOP who had ODS (Obama) and HDS ( Hillary) long before TDS was a thing that cult like republicans created to deflect from real issues. If there is one person who had ODS and HDS more than anybody it was Donald Trump.