At the October 24, 2022, city council meeting, Cara Catallo expressly identified herself a representative of Main Street Oakland County and spoke on an agenda item involving Main Street Oakland County. Speaking on that agenda item, Catallo also discussed Main Street Clarkston, an organization our tax dollars helped fund and that is affiliated with Main Street Oakland County. During her report, Catallo made an incendiary and vile allegation against Eric Haven, the elected mayor of the City of the Village of Clarkston. After listening to Catallo’s comments that evening, I think Main Street Oakland County, Main Street Clarkston, and Cara Catallo all owe our city – and in particular, our mayor – an apology. And if Catallo misrepresented the position of these two organizations, they should disavow her and cut off her further participation in their mission.
By way of background, Catallo is associated with the nascent organization named Main Street Clarkston and presumably will be an eventual board member. Main Street Clarkston formed a non-profit corporation, and Catallo said that the plan is to eventually obtain a 501(c)(3) charitable organization status. Even though Main Street Clarkston has zero legal relationship to the city, your tax dollars helped establish it. Based on her comments, Catallo seems to be primarily concerned with using Main Street Clarkston to help local businesses rather than the city as a whole. (I’m sure it’s totally a coincidence that her brother owns five businesses on our tiny Main Street.)
We were told one of the reasons for forming Main Street Clarkston was so that it could affiliate with Main Street Oakland County, which is an Oakland County economic development organization. Main Street Oakland County is also funded with taxpayer dollars and private contributions. (You can read more about them here.) The purpose of the affiliation was to make Clarkston eligible to receive grant money.
Earlier in the October 24, 2022, city council meeting (and unrelated to her later trip to the podium as the self-identified representative of Main Street Oakland County), Catallo used the public comment agenda item to deliver a prepared speech that largely expressed her contempt for Mayor Eric Haven and used words such as “disgraceful,” “reckless,” “self-centered,” “lazy,” “ignorant,” and “selfish.” Her rambling speech appeared to be primarily related to the unanimous city council vote to adopt paid parking in the Depot Road parking lot at the October 10th city council meeting (something her brother’s businesses didn’t want), but it also included other issues that apparently also displeased her (a cake and a flier). Despite being allowed to hurl insults at the mayor and city council for five straight minutes (when public comments are limited to three minutes), Catallo interrupted the proceedings with a childish outburst just over a minute after her speech concluded because she wanted to be recognized to make a comment to another audience member, even though public comment at city council meetings is to be directed at city council members. (Catallo rudely yelled her comment to the audience member despite not being recognized to speak again.) A recording of that city council meeting can be found here, Catallo’s public comments can be found here, and her outburst can be found here.
Item 12b on the October 24, 2022, agenda was a discussion to provide an update from Main Street Oakland County, and that item was taken up around the 1:08:52 time mark in the meeting video. (I’ve linked a clip limited to that discussion here for convenience.) Mayor Haven announced the agenda item and asked if there was a representative from Main Street Oakland County present for the discussion. Cara Catallo said “yeah, Cara” and walked up to the podium to provide the update.
Most of Catallo’s update was a recitation of the steps that had been taken to establish Main Street Clarkston and the work that was being done to support businesses in town, which includes gifting them with preprinted paper bags. Catallo took the opportunity to use a portion of her report on this agenda item to attack Mayor Haven again, saying that Haven had made a statement that “we don’t need diversity” – without indicating when or why the statement occurred. To ensure that the maximum negative inference was achieved, Catallo claimed that she needed to make sure that Haven’s purported anti-diversity beliefs in no way reflected their nonprofit position and said that they didn’t want to risk losing any grant opportunities because of Haven’s comment.
Displaying more self-control than I would have been able to muster after such a huge insult, Mayor Haven waited until the end of the discussion to address Catallo’s contention that he had anti-diversity beliefs. He told her that he didn’t recall the statement or the context. Catallo said she needed to “protect her organization” without expressly articulating what she was trying to protect the organization from. She also demanded that Haven answer the question – what did he mean when he said we don’t need diversity? Since Haven didn’t remember making the statement, he couldn’t answer the question. The city attorney interjected and said that Catallo’s comments were inappropriate and amounted to electioneering. (To the city attorney’s point, Catallo, her mother, her daughter, her ex, and her brother’s business partner all signed Mayor Haven’s opponent’s campaign petition, which you can see here.)
The ostensible “anti-diversity” comment was made two months before on August 22, 2022. This was the meeting where Catallo and Brandon Still came to the city council to ask for $1,000 of taxpayer money to help them establish Main Street Clarkston, and Catallo expressed a hope that the city would give them more taxpayer money in the future. During the extended discussion, and before providing his full support, Mayor Haven talked about how this new organization and Clarkston should come together because everyone wants the same thing. Catallo picked this one sentence from Mayor Haven’s four-minute, broadly supportive comment to attack him two months later: “But a lot of things we do, we want to be on the same page, so we don’t need diversity, we need unanimity, you know, going forward.” (The audio of the August 22, 2022, meeting can be found here, and the Main Street Oakland County/Main Street Clarkston discussion starts at video time mark 0:30:48.)
Here is an informal transcript of the comment that Catallo was referring to (taken from Clarkston Sunshine), and I’ve bolded the comment that she plucked out of context:
Haven said he wanted to say something candidly to Catallo and Still, and he alluded to this earlier. He’s watched you guys over time, you know, he’s watched what you’ve done. He talked with Catallo about the banners two years ago in town and other things they’ve done. She’s chaired their sign committee. You gave us good signage. Still is proactive in getting grant money. Haven (unintelligible) the last 24 hours, he talked about the two grants that really you were successful in getting last year $2,500, and he thinks Lines benefitted and he thinks Still’s [?] business benefitted as well. There may have been some others and Haven doesn’t know how they distributed all the money, but nevertheless, his question to him was, and his question to you is this – when thinking about the personnel, the liaisons going forward, is there’s something that you may not have taken into consideration, and that is, you realize the city is a charity already. (An unidentified person agreed.) Haven said that we are not a 501(c)(3); municipalities are charities in and of themselves. The Friends of Depot Park two years ago raised $50,000 in cash and in-kind gifts to match a DNR [Department of Natural Resources] grant of $50,000, OK? And what that money was used for was putting down the pathways in the park, OK? So, we’ve already exercised that tool here that we have. With Smith being affiliated, if you will, a board member or not board member, and he knows they have some affection for Smith (unintelligible), you’ve worked with him already, if that’s too strong a term, no misunderstanding, but he gets the relationship, and he knows Rodgers has been very proactive as far as the Christmas Market and so on, and he’s encouraged her to do that as well, so, Haven has been thinking about this a lot, thinking about relative to the history and our relationship with Oakland County, and realizing that the crux of the issue is revenue that benefits our business community. If you’re in our community at large, all right, as a result of that, so he’s not opposed to this relationship. He’s been thinking about it for quite a while because he knew what the history was. He knew the 2008 history. He was sitting here. He knew the DDA discussion, you know, which had no merit whatsoever. But you guys in fact have put a lot of energy, you know, into this, so he’s appreciative of that, frankly. His only thought was that he did want to see the articles of incorporation and the bylaws. He thinks that it’s right that we do that if we’re going to call ourselves in some respect, you know, affiliated, we need to understand that, but you’re a private, you’re a separate entity. If you’re going to go for your own 501(c)(3), that’s up to you, but you can utilize, and we’ve already utilized, the charitable institution we have right here, you know, right now for dealing with grants. Haven said he thinks what you’re bringing to the picture is a lot of energy, you know. You guys have worked hard over the last two years and you’re bringing energy to this cause, and he thinks together, we all want the same thing. We all want a prosperous community and COVID hit us right between the eyes and we’re still sort of trying to recover from this. But a lot of things we do, we want to be on the same page, so we don’t need diversity, we need unanimity, you know, going forward. So, he’d like to, we can do what we want with this discussion item tonight. You kind of heard the council, you know, the spirit, and so on, and we can leave it at this for a moment, and then take next steps toward you moving forward.
If there’s a desire from council, Haven said he would entertain a motion if you want to do that, for the $1,000 for (unintelligible) for the 501(c)(3), if you still think you need that. Catallo thinks they do.
(I’ve clipped the video of Mayor Haven’s four-minute comments here.)
There is absolutely nothing in Haven’s statement that would require Main Street Oakland County or Main Street Clarkston to publicly distance themselves to avoid the risk of not getting grant money. But in order to understand the statement, you would need to be provided with the context, something that Catallo deliberately, and I think unfairly, did not provide. (Perhaps it was because she wanted to continue using a public city council meeting to trash the mayor shortly before an election? 🤔)
The non-offensive definition of “diversity” means variety; a mix; something not homogenous. The opposite of the non-offensive definition of diversity would be the word that Haven used in connection with it – unanimity. In context, Haven was obviously saying that if Main Street Clarkston was going to form as a separate organization, he hoped that everyone would be working together in unison.
On the other hand, the “woke” definition of diversity generally refers to a person’s race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, etc. At its essence, woke diversity (and inclusion) first divides people into categories based on their differences and then seeks to bring them together representatively (inclusion). To say that someone is anti-diversity in the context of this latter definition is nothing more than a form of code to place a vile label on that person, inferring that person is racist, sexist, homophobic (or any other “-ist” or “phobic” adjectives you can imagine).
On August 22, 2022, Mayor Haven was clearly intending to use the non-offensive definition of diversity and no one in the room – based on their lack of reaction in the video – believed otherwise. This included the city attorney who undoubtedly would have been quick to call out any speaker for racist, sexist, homophobic, or other similar comments, given that the city could be sued if unacceptable beliefs like these were used to make any city decision.
You’ll also note that Catallo continued to nod in assent as Haven made his comments about unanimity versus diversity, as she had throughout the four minutes during which he spoke. If Catallo was upset about Haven’s comments and understood them to be vile, why didn’t she speak out at the time? Did she care more about getting and using taxpayer dollars to help businesses, including her brother’s businesses, than she did about woke diversity? Or perhaps she didn’t perceive the comment to be offensive at the time – just like every other person in the room. And yet, on October 24, 2022, Catallo, the claimed representative of Main Street Oakland County, viciously attacked the elected mayor of Clarkston as being anti-diversity using its most negative, “woke” inference.
Is it the official position of Main Street Oakland County that Clarkston’s mayor is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.? Does Main Street Oakland County approve of its representatives making negative, unsupported allegations about local elected officials? If the answer to both questions is no, then Main Street Oakland County would be wise to disaffiliate with Catallo.
If Catallo was speaking as a representative of Main Street Clarkston, then I have the same questions. And, given that Main Street Clarkston is trying to obtain a highly desired non-profit status from the Internal Revenue Service, I also would like to know how Catallo’s conduct squares with Article II, 2 of Main Street Clarkston’s articles of incorporation, which state, in part, that it “will not participate or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of or against any candidate for public office.” (I’ve linked to Main Street Clarkston’s articles of incorporation here.)
Main Street Oakland County and Main Street Clarkston would be better represented by someone else, someone who won’t use either of their organizations to unfairly cast any elected official in a false light or in an arguable attempt to influence that person’s election, something that was obvious to the city attorney on October 24th when he accused Catallo of electioneering.
Catallo is clearly unfit to represent either organization and should step down immediately. If she refuses to do so, then Clarkston taxpayers should not be forced to contribute one more penny to Main Street Clarkston.