Yeah, I blogged again

This exercise in whatever it is--journalism? speaking truth to power? whining?--lapsed for a year because writing takes energy, especially writing for no money, and at the end of the day, complaints about the administration of my one great city go nowhere because of a City Council that nods approvingly at everything the current mayor does. Because civility.
As a result, we're in a place where the billion-dollar bank gets a half-million-dollar payday, the downtown revitalization plan spends $10 million for a net gain of exactly one apartment building, the city refuses to fix a bridge and thus encourages schoolchildren to walk across a frozen river, the poor get threats that their no-judgments gym will be taken away from them, taxes still go up, and lawyers get paid.
It's the Plattsburgh circle of life right now, and it feels like an infinite loop. But the stripping of the city's best assets, including its recreation assets, for no perceptible reason other than the mayor's insatiable need to pad his resume, deserves to be noted for future people in charge, if nothing else.
So I'm noting it.
I ran across something that helps explain both why I blogged about this stuff in the first place, and why I haven't for a long time. Here's the kicker:

If your local media has no place for people who voice contempt for your city’s police chief, say, or your state’s attorney general, or the publisher of your city’s largest newspaper, all of those people will feel more comfortable in abusing their power. They will grind you down, and in the process, they’ll tell you to be civil about it.

Stop Rexit!

Having done a bit of reading on the Internet, I’m aware of something called Brexit, a poorly thought-out idea springing from the minds of a few well-off, and often strange, individuals. They convinced enough Brits that there was an emergency at hand (there wasn’t), and that Brexit would save them from it (it won’t).

Now comes Mayor Colin Read, a well-off individual, foisting a poorly thought-out idea on the City of Plattsburgh: Essentially killing the city’s main recreation assets.

Let’s call it Rexit.

The idea behind Rexit, whose details are taking form behind closed doors as I write this, is that Plattsburgh faces a dire fiscal emergency that can only be solved by divesting the city of a) its indoor recreation facility at the Crete Center b) its public marina c) its public gymnasium. Or maybe all three.

I won’t go into all of the city’s numbers here, because I don’t believe them. There’s a reason for this. I don’t believe anything that comes from city government since Read took over in 2017.

Let’s take the marina as an example. Under the previous administration, the city had a long-term plan to expand the marina and run a surplus that would subsidize other programs. Mayor Read, as part of an effort to scrap the expansion, quietly changed the city’s “mortgage” on the marina docks from a 15-year to a 10-year term, which increased the city’s annual payment from $77,000 to $101,000—making the city’s recreation fiscal picture look way worse than it actually is.

Another example: Councillor Rachelle Armstrong, in answering a query about the potential closing of the gym, said hard choices had to be made: 

More broadly,  since Plattsburgh has been ranked the 2nd most fiscally stressed city in the entire state, and since the Rec Complex has consistently run a deficit with the gym's deficit being the greatest, I consider an investigation into its operations and finances to be my responsibility as the committee chair with oversight in this area.

Wow, remember when Plattsburgh was ranked the “2^nd most fiscally stressed city in the entire state”?

Me neither.

Because it wasn’t. And isn’t. 

It’s, like, 19^th. 

Not great, but that's not even in the stressed-city playoffs, let alone vying for the title. When I pointed this out, Armstrong to her credit apologized for the mistake, but such an egregious error casts doubt on the entirety of the city’s “investigation” of recreation.

The rec debate brings up a question: Why would the mayor and his allies on the council want the city’s finances to look more dire than they are?

I can’t speculate on his allies, but the mayor, like all of us, wants to be the hero of his own narrative. He just seems more hell-bent than the rest of us. He’s constantly bad-mouthed the city’s finances, saying that the city must increase its fund balance or we will all die of higher taxes. (Meanwhile, he’s busy raising taxes—and the city’s residential assessments have skyrocketed, pushing tax bills still higher, but that gets in the way of a good story.)

It’s almost like he’s trying to write a triumphant, concluding chapter in a book about how he saved a city from financial ruin—and can point to the fund balance as proof. Someone driving that narrative has incentive to make things look terrible in the early chapters, and an excuse to shut down or sell off irreplaceable city assets, to get to that heroic climax. 

Is there an alternative?

Why, yes.

Slow down. Do a real study about things like shared services, rather than the rushed 90-day “process,” with little public input, that’s been imposed on the city this fall.

Include in the discussion two just-elected council members, Paul DeDominicas and Ira Barbell, who have plenty of experience with government budgets.

Give people a real chance to weigh in on decisions that on their present course seem certain to deprive the city of prime revenue-generating opportunities, and more important, take away some of the city’s most valued community resources.

In short, think of the future of this city.

And don’t bend to the mayor’s self-serving desire to pen his own phony happy ending.

The stealth representative

Rep. Elise Stefanik came to the U.S. House on a wave of publicity in 2014 as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. (She'll lose that designation to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in November.)

Yet her greatest gift as a politician appears to be an almost Potteresque ability to remain invisible.

via GIPHY

Stefanik steadfastly avoids taking a stand on anything that might create controversy. Her entire public persona consists of scripted constituent-service visits--visiting a butcher shop here, talking to farmers there, bragging about dealing with veterans benefits issues--while saying nothing about the train wreck in D.C. She votes with Donald Trump 90 percent of the time, but doesn't talk about it, silently luxuriating in support from the NRA and big donations from one of the most ruthless financiers in the history of other people's money, the reptilian Paul E. Singer, and his company, Elliott Management.

She is, in short, the perfect former Harvard intern: perky, ambitious, and someone who knows her place. She's on all the right committees, and she smiles nicely while quietly voting to take away health care for people with pre-existing conditions and nodding right along with whatever her House Intelligence Committee mentor, Devin Nunes, thinks should be done about the Russia investigation--which evidently is whatever Donald Trump thinks should be done about the Russia investigation.

And she loves her some Brett Kavanaugh. Or at least did in July.














As of Friday, after the allegations of sexual abuse against Kavanaugh from Christine Blasey Ford were public, a Stefanik staffer in her D.C. office said the Congresswoman was "watching the process very closely."

Watching, and saying nothing. And doing less. Not even after the New Yorker report came out about a second Kavanaugh accuser, nor after Michael Avenatti said he's representing a third Kavanaugh accuser, nor after Montgomery County, MD,  law-enforcement officials reported hearing from what may be a fourth Kavanaugh accuser.

Stefanik has a unique platform. She's a a member of the Congressional Women's Caucus cosponsoring an extension of the Violence Against Women Act. She went to a snooty private high school and an elite Ivy League college. Brett Kavanaugh and the women accusing him are Elise Stefanik's people, or at least her forebears.

She could be a strong, independent voice here, speaking out on the need to investigate these women's claims, and the need for a discussion about Kavanaugh's character, which also includes gambling debts and perjury allegations.

But, as usual, she has decided not to use that voice. Instead, she issues press releases and tweets about her non-controversial legislative efforts--really, who is FOR invasive species?--rendering her insignificant, out-of-the-way, under-the-radar, unimportant.

Invisible.

Deep thoughts III

The proposed Code of Conduct originated in North America but is un-American.

Canada man hates free speech

Mayor Colin Read hates the First Amendment. He can't stand political debate. He only wants to hear the sound of his own voice. It's really the only explanation for his latest master stroke--a 16-page Code of Conduct for city councilors and employees, which applies to everyone in city government except the mayor, funnily enough, and which flouts state law and the federal Bill of Rights.

There's lots of stuff in it, but we'll start here:

17. 7.17  Significant information provided to any member of Council, which is likely to be used in Council or in political debate, should also be provided to all other Council Members, and to the Mayor. 

Sounds like a common-sense step for open government, right? Take it away, Councilor Peter Ensel, in today's Press-Republican:

"I am also upset that the managers who are directly impacted by the code of conduct have not yet been given a copy of the proposed document. I will not agree to a vote tomorrow (Thursday) without their review and a thorough discussion."
Read said he was planning to send a copy of the proposed code of conduct to managers late Wednesday afternoon.

Evidently, the voices of the people who would have to implement and live under the mayor's diktats do not count. So he's already violating the alleged spirit of his proposed code, before it's even passed.

Not surprisingly, Read seems to want to ram this through the Common Council immediately. This has been his pattern. Come up with a scheme in private, then spring it on the press to distract from some recent failure, and force a shellshocked legislature to pass it quickly.

Read cut and pasted his code of conduct from the website of the City of Vancouver. Which is where Read is originally from. Which is Canada. Which is not this country.

But let's try to be fair. Certainly, there must be good reasons for this, right? The floor is yours, Elizabeth Izzo, in a smart story in the Sun Community News:

Read lamented the negative press coverage in the city’s newspapers, noting that while “dramas” were attracting taxpayer attention, there were positive things that city workers were doing everyday, from the Plattsburgh City Police Department’s work combating the opioid crisis to the Department of Public Works’ attention to city streets. 

But the city's newspapers don't write those stories because drama "sells newspapers," he said.

So this is motivated by hurt feelings brought on by the mean old press? I know it snows a lot in Canada, but I didn't think the place bred such snowflakes. (Also, too, point of information: The Sun is free, so it's not technically "sold.")

I could go on, about the section that prevents council members from speaking to city managers, basically at all, without the expressed consent of the mayor, and the language that limits political speech by politicians ("You can't fight in here. This is the War Room."), and....

Well, you're up, free-speech expert:

Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government, believes that the policy appears to be an assertion of authority by the mayor, drawing close attention to how the policy defines “confidential information.” "That is so vague and subjective that I believe it would be inconsistent with law," Freeman told The Sun.

The document is so ridiculous that it ought to be read aloud, laughed at, spat upon, and set fire to in Trinity Park. But the councilors' reactions in the press so far inspire little hope. They seem to be hiding behind the City Charter as a way to not even discuss the awfulness of Read's scheme.

Yet this has nothing to do with the Charter. It's about the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The language in the Charter is designed to prevent councilors from going to managers for skeevy favors, either for themselves or for their constituents. "Hey, City Road Guy, can you pave my driveway?" That sort of thing.

What Read is trying to do is shut off the flow of information from managers to councilors and their constituents by directing it all through himself.

It is suppression of free speech, and of free flow of governmental information. Which may be great for Canada. But did I mention that Canada is not this country? If Read gets away with this, he could soon have us punting on third down and injecting an extraneous "u" into words like color and flavor.

Still, the mayor is right about one thing. The current atmosphere in Plattsburgh is negative. So I, too, decided to search far and wide for a "solution," as the Press-Republican headline called Read's plan, to all this negativity.

And after 3.8 seconds of Googling, I, like the mayor, found answers in Canada. Take us home, Toronto's Globe and Mail:

Mike Gooley, metro market manager at Robert Half International in Toronto, describes typical micromanagers as so controlling that they see every aspect of their employees' work. They also tend to follow up to the point of questioning the person's ability to do the job, he said. When the damage has been done, it lowers morale, stifles creativity, and holds back worthy employees from promotions. Employees may share the experience on social networking sites, he adds, effectively tarnishing the company's reputation. 

Or worse, they might quit. According to a recent survey of 150 Canadian executives, commissioned by Robert Half, 31 per cent of respondents said good employees would quit their job because they were unhappy with their managers. Micromanagers fall into that category, Mr. Gooley said.

Here's the deal. The mayor is running his government like a business. A failing one. He is the source of the negativity. He is the problem. He keeps proving, day after day, that he is not up to the demands of his job.

Where is his solution for that?

Dignity, like democracy, dies in darkness

Bad things happen when those in power force their employees, as a matter of policy, into confidentiality agreements. My bailiwick is sports, and this article about a team that insists on racist branding, and, evidently, sexist creepiness, came across the transom:

This account of the Redskins’ calendar shoot at the Occidental Grand Papagayo is based on interviews with five cheerleaders who were involved, and many details were corroborated with others who heard descriptions of the trip at the time. The cheerleaders spoke on condition of anonymity because they were required to sign confidentiality agreements when they joined the team.

Probably just trying to protect proprietary information, right?

For the photo shoot, at the adults-only Occidental Grand Papagayo resort on Culebra Bay, some of the cheerleaders said they were required to be topless, though the photographs used for the calendar would not show nudity. Others wore nothing but body paint. Given the resort’s secluded setting, such revealing poses would not have been a concern for the women — except that the Redskins had invited spectators.

Non-disclosure agreements, like attorney-client privilege claims, have become weaponized by weirdos.

Classified: Do Not Read

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the City of Plattsburgh administration is its penchant for treating a small municipality's affairs as if they were grave matters of national security.

The weirdest manifestation of this: labeling large swathes of public business as "confidential," and calling anything that gets into public view a "leak."

Bemoaning "leaks of confidential documents" makes people feel like they're playing on a big stage, I guess, but it's a disservice to the English language.

For instance, City Councilor Mike Kelly's recent email tirade against demoralized city workers and the Downtown Revitalization Initiative was described as a "leak" in the local press, and Kelly said he made his comments to the other council members "in confidence."

But an email chain on a city government server is tantamount to a public meeting. The public revelation of a city email is not a "leak" at all. It's a "forward." Or a "cut and paste." Usually, those revelations are "boring." But in this case, it was "news."

Nothing an elected or appointed official puts on public email in the course of public business has any guarantee of confidentiality. (That is how I treated my emails when I served on the city Charter Commission, by the way, so this is not just a whiny journalist talking--though partly it is. Anyone can FOIL those Charter emails. It's your right as an American, at least until Putin completes the takeover.)

The same thing happened when Read and Kelly were caught on the city streaming video feed prattling on about how sanitation workers aren't productive and how the City of Plattsburgh might be better off dissolving and how the Town of Plattsburgh is a bunch of Dick Tracy villains who stole $11 million from the city. (Or was it $1.4 million? Or was it negative $280 bajillion, after the city pays its legal fees? It's all so complicated, and only a great intellect can comprehend such maths.)

The video only existed because Read forgot to turn off the recorder thingy. But he wanted in the worst way to get at the dastardly "leakers" who circulated a publicly streamed video of a conversation about public policy between public officials in a public space. Did I mention that he forgot to turn off the recorder thingy? The point here: It's not a leak.

In fact, there really aren't many aspects of a small city's governance that are "confidential," or that could be "leaked"--especially not communications between Plattsburgh's wee legislative and executive branches.

We're not dealing with international espionage. Or ongoing law-enforcement investigations. Or family court or police personnel records, which are confidential under New York State law. (For a good primer on what stuff is and isn't public in New York, by the way, check out this Poughkeepsie Journal article.).

But the mayor wants to talk about them as if they are. And he really, really craves secrecy. So much so, in fact, that he apparently often labels emails to city councilors "Privileged Attorney-Client Correspondence – not subject to FOIL or forwarding." The sole arbiter of this "privilege" seems to be the mayor himself. He is The State, and will decide What Cannot Be Seen.

I made a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for those "privileged" emails to see what issues are so vital to Plattsburgh's interests that that they must remain hidden from public view. If I get any, I'll publish them.

Just don't call them "leaks." They're taxpayer property.