Was at the sparsely attended Whitehall City Council meeting last night, July 10th (just me and Ward 3 candidate Paul Werther in attendance), and the only thing of interest were the three ordinances regarding Charter Review recommendations that the council passed* to send along to the ballot in November ‘for the citizens themselves to decide’. I’m including them in this blog for your scrutiny.

First off: gender neutrality in the Charter language.

Pretty straight forward. One or two people in the Charter Review commission felt this was important. If the entirety of the Charter used ‘she’ to connote a person/official I, as a man, wouldn’t have a problem with it. Is it an important enough issue to go through all this business for: putting it on the ballot, changing all the records, etc.? The question is really moot at this point as its going to the ballot in November.

Here is the ordinance passed tonight in regard to who succeeds the Mayor if the President of Council passes on it with only a year left in the term.

This one actually makes sense to do because this scenario wasn’t considered and its simply putting a button on something that needs it.

Finally, the most important one ( in terms of foolishness, disrespect to the electorate, conflicts of interest, giving people with power even more power in a city where the majority of voters mostly don’t pay attention or vote and, most suspicious in its ‘need’ to be on the ballot) of the three: term limits. Apparently, after the last two times this was affirmed by the citizens (after they initially mandated it at the ballot) asking people to fully end term limits seemed to be too much for them to ask. Perhaps ‘compromising’ (a term which council members used) to only allow them three terms instead of unending terms might be something the voters would allow…

This essentially says that if passed, every elected office would ultimately be able to serve for three consecutive terms. One must assume then that the language in the ordinance precludes them from serving more than three based on the amount of time they’re already in there, ala Bailey and Conison who, in a year and a half would term out of their two terms.

Of course, no where to be seen, is the loophole which allows them to jump from at-Large to Ward and back again, utterly disrespecting the spirit of the citizens law, such as Rodriguez and Bailey and Kantor  have done. That has needed closing now for several years and it has been brought to Council’s attention on several occasions but…they can’t seem to respect the citizens mandate, do the right thing and close it. No, not them. That loophole has allowed Councilman Rodriguez to completely disrespect the spirit of the citizens intent and be in office for 16 and a half years (with his friends on council also losing track of the spirit of those they’re supposed to be serving and considering when they appointed him back to his old Ward 1 seat after he lost his bid as Auditor, and the Ward councilperson ran for at-Large).

On the second page of the legislation it gives two examples of ballot language. This is given for the Board of Elections to pick the less confusing of the two. The underlining is just to separate the two wordings. In highlighter, I’ve shown my pick.

Finally, the last paragraph of the last page is highlighted merely to show you how officious your government has gotten…’emergency measure immediately necessary for the preservation of the public health(!), peace, safety and welfare(!)…oy vey! In essence to say that this ordinance is VITAL for Whitehall to continue on as a community and anything less is unacceptable and will cause grievous harm to our municipality. Their increasing officiousness is strangulating.

On a personal note and apropos of nothing other than my being an aficionado of words, and with all due respect to City Attorney Bivens, who I think well of, I have never seen the word heretofore used as heretobefore in any previous writings I’ve come across in my 56 years. Nor could I find it in a computer search, it kept coming up heretofore. Even WordPress won’t rid the word of its red underlining. I know its silly nitpicking but these things stand out to me.

*It was the two newest members of Council, Elmore and Heck, who made a motion and seconded it to vote on the term limits legislation (Councilman Morrison was absent). It felt apparent to me that they took the motion so it wouldn’t be one of the more senior citizen-spirit-disrespecting scalawags who would make the motion for the ordinance in order to save themselves from the mere proximity to the appearance of pushing the term limits ballot issue. With Elmore and Heck doing it, the rest were spared the dirty smudge of perception that is, in actuality, rightfully theirs to wear.