EXTEND DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS!

EXTEND PROGRESS IN SAFETY!

EXTEND PROGRESS IN PARKS!

We all know why this is foolish fear-mongering on a very base level. Every time someone new gets into office, they do their best to ‘progress’ the city and community they lead. To suggest that others won’t is to say that the current leader is the only one with the brains to ‘progress’ anything and that all others are weak and useless in comparison (including all those who served before who respected term limits as set forth by the citizens for their government officials). The argument is being made simply to stoke fear in citizens (for theirs and businesses benefit), afraid that the next one in will be a Troglodyte who eats with their feet. It’s ridiculous. Some excel, some fail but, no one is an utter horror. To suggest so is merely to promote self-interest and we already have plenty of that at City Hall.

I feel this is about vested interests promoting changing the safeguard of the people’s long-held law for one elected official who will continue with those vested interests.

In their literature, for the first several of the expensive mailings, the tag line was already properly placed (and no doubt already ordered up) : “Extend Term Limits”. So, once the opposition came out with their yard signs saying: “Keep Term Limits” their literature then changed to say: “Keep & Extend Term Limits”, which is the biggest bunch of horseshit I’ve read. ‘Keep them, but extend them!’ ‘Term limits’ are traditionally two. When people speak of ‘term limits’ you know they’re talking about two. While saying that extending terms to mean three but still having a cap on terms is ‘keeping’ term limits, where does it end; three, five, ten? What is the point of having term limits if their ‘limit’ keeps moving and therefore be as long as someone wants them to be? You could say this about 10 terms! ‘We’re keeping term limits but extending them to ten!’ It’s utterly ridiculous.

Two terms have long been the standard and norm in American history. Two terms has become, essentially, the default position and understanding of what ‘term limits’ mean, clear up to the POTUS. That is why the ‘No on Issue 37’ people’s signage is correct. Keeping what has been in place nearly 25 years IS the default position in Whitehall, that which is being ‘kept’. The ‘yes on Issue 37’ committee’s position is that they want them extended, not ‘ended’, therefore the correct verbiage for them is ‘Extend Term Limits’ (which was on their literature but not on the yard signs). To suggest that they’re ‘keeping’ them is disingenuous to their aim, which is actually to ‘change’ them by extending them to three (perhaps their truest slogan should’ve been ‘Change Term Limits!’). There was no doubt a ripple in the committee when the ‘Keep Term Limits’ signs came out and citizens freaked out that ‘term limits’ may be done away with, thus derailing their campaign and the probable reason for the change in their literature.

Here is a telling piece of campaign literature which was leaked to me in 2015.

To my knowledge it was never released. It was a piece extolling Kim Maggard’s ‘vision’ and her place as the head honcho of Whitehall. There are two things of interest in the piece (besides the misspelling). One is her referring to herself as the ‘CEO of a $33,000,000 corporation’ and the other is the telling way she suggests that to ‘Keep Whitehall Moving Forward’ is to re-elect her as our CEO…I mean, Mayor.

Firstly, as a voting human citizen of this little suburb of Columbus Ohio, I take issue with our elected Mayor boasting of herself as some titan of business, where in the real world she would’ve no doubt never reached such a position. In Whitehall, she practically ran unopposed in 2011 with the endorsement of then-Mayor John Wolfe (who now has a ‘Vote No Issue 37’ sign in his yard), got in and then had the power of incumbency in 2015 against her challenger, Leslie LaCorte (that which no one else took on). We the people see her as the community’s leader but she sees herself as the CEO of a multimillion dollar ‘corporation’. That is currently in evidence with her business-friendly ‘city motto’, “Opportunity is here” and the lavishness of the business donations to the campaign to extend her power…I mean, extend term limits to three.
The current campaign to extend term limits phrases their campaign with ‘extending’ everything from parks progress to safety to development. The argument’s reasoning being that without her, Kim Maggard, none of this will continue without her (and let’s be honest, this is totally about Kim Maggard. No one is fighting this hard with this much money for a Bob Bailey or Karen Conison or Larry Morrison third term…please!). You’ll note then the echo of this current campaign’s reasoning in this piece of literature from 3 years ago, “Keep Whitehall Moving Forward…Re Elect Kim Maggard on Nov. 3rd” Even then, it was a sales pitch aimed at suggesting brakes being applied or ‘movement in Whitehall’ as a car careening into a ditch were she to leave office. Again, as my late Father used to say, “Bullshit!”

Here is the Committee’s latest mailer, received just three days ago. It is posed as an endorsement ‘letter’:

Note the asterisk next to Barb Blake’s name. Here they have her listed as the Treasurer of the WCCA but she is also listed on Whitehall’s webpage as one of the members of the Planning Commission. Given this, I’ve duly noted her here as a political appointee too.

I have taken the liberty of adding the black circles next to the names of political appointees (that important political fact they seem to have omitted in the flier’s descriptions). This flier is rife with vested interests! From the City of Whitehall webpage:

You see here that, per the City of Whitehall’s webpage, that Mayor Maggard is responsible for most of the political appointments (with some by Council or Council through Board of Education) As such, when they lend their names to endorse the passage of Issue 37, can they be trusted to do so with ethical mindfulness for the public trust or, in doing so, because of the quid pro quo conflict of interest inherent in their relationships to City Hall, do this for other reasons? Passing a ballot issue that would benefit their backers? It is the stuff that erodes the integrity of, and the confidence in, our people’s government.

Conflicts of interest riddle our government and its processes with its cancer. As well, harm the very sanctity of the people’s community of Whitehall. It makes it rightfully seem that no one cares, no one seems to have ethical considerations in these matters. When officials respect the public trust entrusted them in government, they avoid these conflicts because of the suspicion they place on the ethicality of leaders motives, plain and simply. When conflicts of interest appear and are not properly heeded, they beg the citizen’s question: is this being done because of the reasons stated or is there some duplicitous underlying reason harmful to our government, community or ethical principles in general? Is it about power? Corruption? Because ignoring conflicts of interest is untrustworthy behavior, we simply can’t know the answers to these concerns. As such we just can’t, without reason to do so, give of them our sacred trust. They have not earned it.

None of the appointees listed cared about the conflicts of interest, which means, they don’t care about the citizens who entrusted THEIR government to those in charge, to operate it with scrupulous care and fairness for the people, not themselves. Conflicts of interest say, we’re doing this for ourselves, we don’t care how it looks or whether its right for citizens. The ignoring of conflicts, time after time, say that they simply don’t care and therefore everything I’ve said on this subject is accurate*.

This is precisely why term limits, as they currently exist, should be respected and kept and why they were put into place to begin with. It is clear that the current bunch care more about their own interests, above those of the city and the public trust, which leads to the unavoidable conclusion that they and their cronies have a stranglehold on power in our government**, that which they’ve amassed and clung to for themselves. It is not representative of citizen representatives and contrary to power being in the hands of the citizens rather than a small clique of disrespectful power-hungry entities. What else am I left to think by their own careless actions?

As well, two former councilpersons are on this list of endorsements, marked by the gold stars I placed next to their names. Tom Potter leads the ‘Yes on Issue 37’ campaign from whence the endorsement flier came. Mike Shannon was also the former city attorney and donated a good sum to the ‘Your Right to Vote’ committee set up to end term limits only five years ago, in 2013. Note Mayor Maggard’s interest in that campaign too.

Apparently, after the last campaign, people got smarter about how to handle this ‘problem’ for elected officials.

*This is the ‘Code of Ethics and Conduct For Elected and Appointed Officials in Belmont California. It is an excellent resource for how government can and should be run. When reading it, the glaringly awful behavior of Whitehall’s officials is made apparent. http://www.belmont.gov/home/showdocument?id=11083

**Mayor and council appoint people to boards and commissions. Council moves around from council to at Large and when seat is vacated, they themselves appoint the one who’ll fill the seat who then can run with the power of incumbency. Council appoints Charter Review who makes recommendation which benefits those in office with continued power which council then sends to the ballot. A committee is formed with an elected official as the Treasurer (collusion about the campaign with his ‘Team Mates’?). Whitehall political appointees endorse ballot issue which benefits elected leaders, giving them more power than what the citizens said they wanted three times now. In other words, the system YOU entrusted them with is being manipulated by them, not for your benefit but, the aggrandizement of their own power. They think you’re stupid enough to fall for it, I believe you’re not. That’s why I fight.