The mayor looks at life from both sides now

Give Plattsburgh Mayor Colin Read credit for this much: He can't be shamed.

At the first Common Council meeting since last week's viral (for Plattsburgh) hot mic moment, Read apologized to city workers, sort of. "Some of the workers who listened to that thought that somehow I didn't respect their value and contribution to the city, and nothing can be farther from the truth," he said.

This from the man caught on his own city video feed condescendingly mulling the merits of "the guy who sits on the back of a garbage truck all day," and concluding that guy was "probably not" getting more productive.

Somehow, people concluded that showed a lack of respect. In Read's world, those people are wrong.

And in a sense they are. Because Read is hard to pin down. Like an electron obeying the laws of quantum physics, he appears able to occupy two or more different places at once. He has a habit of saying one thing, then saying something completely contradictory, and proceeding as if there's nothing strange about that. He can respect city workers while saying utterly disrespectful things about them.

His multiple, simultaneous views on dissolving the city serve as another example. During his conversation with "Hot Mike" Kelly, Read embraced dissolution. In his City Sun column this week, he initially staked out the position that this was a brave stand.

Somebody took exception that I’m willing to utter the word *merger. I don’t find that word threatening. Indeed, perhaps a dozen people have since told me that they were glad somebody was willing to mention the unmentionable.

(*Read never uttered the word "merger" in the hot-mic video. Also, for those new to his oeuvre, Read's columns are filled with unknowable pronouns. "Somebody" is a frequent source, often a critic. So are "people." They are never named, but we are to assume they are trustworthy experts hewn from sturdy moral timber. Also, unspecified "things" often appear in his columns, many of which we should "do" to be "sustainable." Moving along...)

A brave stand, indeed! Read has grabbed with both hands the third rail of local politics--consolidating the city and the town!

Let's do this, then! What's his next sentence say?

Let’s be clear, though. The city is not going away... 

Oh. Buzzkill. The piece concludes:

Dissolution is unnecessary. Dialogue is. We all want a city for our next generation of workers and residents, and must plan accordingly today for a city forever.

What happened to the merger, and the brave stand at the ramparts? I'm confused.

But sowing confusion is the mayor's genius. Take the hot mic itself. He seems not to acknowledge  that the city's video stream, the city he ostensibly runs, caught his conversation with Kelly. He initially said "someone" (perhaps a close and evil relative of "somebody") put it on YouTube, trying to make it about nefarious enemies rather than his own failure to push the power button.

Read even doubled down, as NCPR's Zach Hirsch put it, on his hot-mic take in a conversation with reporters after the council meeting last night.

And, speaking with reporters after the meeting, he reiterated concerns about the fact that a private conversation was made public. He said the situation has even caused a “chilling effect.”
“Now my councilors are saying to themselves, ‘jeez is it safe to talk here? Should we go over here, should we go over there, is there a microphone in this room?’ We’ve completely chilled the ability of my councilors to have conversations and that really troubles me,” Read said.
(Read's private conversation with Kelly occurred in the Common Council's weekly meeting room, where there are microphones and cameras in plain view. All meetings are streamed live on YouTube. The video that's circulating was originally recorded on the city's own feed.)

Kudos to Hirsch for that necessary parenthetical paragraph. It's an antidote to the gaslighting that's been a fixture in city government for the past year.

The local press corps will need to do more of this in covering the Read administration, and its upcoming decisions on sales of city property, the now-contentious relations with the Town, and the state of the city's finances--which the mayor is making out to be an apocalypse.

Reality check, please.