This claim is really a scrape-the-bottom-of-the-barrel argument wrapped in disdain for Clarkston residents. This little gem comes to you courtesy of Scott Meyland.
During the city council’s special meeting on September 23rd, Meyland made a public comment claiming that it was just awful that the citizen-initiated HDC charter proposal didn’t follow the same procedures as the 2018-2019 city-initiated charter review committee. Meyland claimed the city-appointed charter review committee had multiple public hearings to obtain community input.
And just like Moses recording God’s word onto stone tablets, the “Charming” group dutifully transcribed Meyland’s public comments and put them on its website. This was followed by a letter to the editor of the Clarkston News from Meyland describing his experience on the charter review committee and again alleging the charter review committee “held multiple public hearings for community suggestions and feedback.” Meyland disdainfully suggested that unlike the ostensibly upstanding people appointed to the charter review committee (such as himself), the “filers” didn’t seek community feedback or encourage public discussion on the proposed HDC charter amendment. (This is just another personal attack without naming names, because it’s clear “the filers” are my husband and me.)
To summarize, Meyland is suggesting we apparently sat in our damp basement, made things up, consulted no one, put those things on paper, and voilà, the HDC charter proposal was born and will be on the November ballot. Meyland ignores the fact that everything in the charter proposal seeks to address actual HDC resident abuse that was in many cases brought directly to the city council and ignored. Meyland has no idea who we talked to before announcing what we were going to do, the discussions with the 54 people who signed the petition, the conversations generated after we transparently posted the HDC petition language and explained what it was all about, and he fails to mention it required a lawsuit against the city to even get the proposal on the ballot because the city apparently didn’t want people to speak through their votes.
Meyland’s “multiple public hearings” claim seemed weird to me because it didn’t match my memory. So, I did a bit of research and found a summary of the charter review committee’s activity in the April 22, 2019, city council packet. It referenced one library meeting between December 12, 2018 (when the committee was formed) and April 22, 2019, when the committee presented its “findings and recommendations” to the city council. As I’ll explain in a minute, Meyland’s committee was far less interested in input from the community than it was in helping former mayor Eric Haven with his pesky little election issue, something that’s important to know when considering Meyland, and his comments, in the proper perspective.
If you want to know which people are working together, look for common phrases and conduct. You might recognize Meyland’s disdainful reference to “filers” because that word was used in a different letter to the editor written by four former mayors (with a more extensive version featured on the “Charming” group’s website). Of these four former mayors, one of them loved Clarkston so much that he bought a house somewhere else (Stephen Arkwright); another not only bought a house somewhere else but he’s also running the “Charming” group opposing the charter amendment, so he’s apparently in favor of HDC resident abuse (Joe Luginski); one refused to recuse herself on parking issues that benefited her son’s restaurants when she was a sitting city council member and while she was a corporate officer of a company that owned some of those restaurants benefitting from favorable parking votes (Sharron Catallo); and the fourth and our most recent former mayor, Eric Haven, who doesn’t live in the historic district.
Haven is very important to Meyland’s claims about the charter review committee. Given its original purpose, it’s odd that Meyland is bragging about it. I guess Meyland is counting on most people not remembering how it all started. I’d love to help with that.
Let’s get into our time machine and go back to 2018. That was the year Haven decided to oust former mayor Steven Percival. At the time, our charter had a requirement that was colloquially referred to as “resign to run.” It meant that a sitting council member (or mayor) who wanted to run for a different elective seat (as mayor or council member) had to resign his/her current seat before running.
Rather than following the charter and honorably resigning his council member seat before starting his campaign for mayor to allow the public to be aware that there would be a one-year vacancy to fill for his former city council seat if they were interested in running for it, Haven ran a stealth campaign and collected petition signatures from insiders before resigning. You’d recognize some of Haven’s 2018 petition signers – Stephen Arkwright, Joe Luginski, and Sharron Catallo, the former mayors mentioned earlier; Jennifer Radcliff (HDC commissioner); Melissa Luginski (current HDC commissioner and married to Joe, “Charming” group organizer); Carol Eberhardt, former city official who’s been making false claims about the charter proposal on social media and in city council meetings; and Al Avery, who’s currently running for city council on a platform of keeping Clarkston “charming.” (Yes folks, they all know each other. If you think the campaign against the proposed HDC charter amendment is grassroots and not highly coordinated and organized, including comments at city council meetings and letters to the editor, you’ve got another think coming.)
Haven didn’t submit his resignation letter until Friday, July 20. He signed his Affidavit of Identity on July 13 (a document that needs to be filed along with signed petitions) but he didn’t submit it to the city right away because that would have tipped his hand and ended the secrecy. Sharron Catallo was one of the insiders who knew about Haven’s resignation before it became public knowledge (because she signed his petition), and she helped circulate nominating petitions over the weekend for a hand-picked candidate to fill Haven’s vacated city council seat – that the public wasn’t aware would even occur to give others a chance to express an interest.
In fact, the public didn’t find out about Haven’s resignation or the vacancy it created until the evening city council meeting on July 23, which was the date Haven turned in his Affidavit of Identity that he’d signed ten days before. Completed signature petitions for all mayor and city council candidates were due the next day on July 24, and when the smoke cleared, Haven was the only candidate for mayor and the insiders were able to use that time to choose Haven’s successor for the one-year vacancy on city council. This is because outsiders would have to have been physically present at the Monday evening city council meeting when Haven’s surprise resignation was made public, since Independence Television recordings aren’t posted right away and they wouldn’t have known what happened to prompt them to listen to the meeting, and they also would have had to collect all the required signatures by 4:00 p.m. the next day. It was truly a slimeball move, an election complaint was filed, Haven was forced to get signatures dated after his resignation, and Percival decided to run against him. (Haven won, Percival lost, and I wrote about it here.)
Haven wanted “resign to run” removed from the city charter so he wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore, and the charter review committee was formed within weeks after he won the election. That’s right – this noble charter committee adventure Meyland is bragging about began with a stealth election campaign in violation of the charter. Arkwright was the charter review committee chair; Meyland was a committee member. After all their “work,” this is what the charter review committee came up with:
-
- Eliminate “resign to run.” (Duh. That was the whole point of the charter review committee).
- Change the time when the audit report must be submitted from 90 days to six months from the close of the fiscal year.
- Allow council members to nominate Zoning Board of Appeals members rather than be appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the city council.
- Allow council members to nominate Board of Review members (people who review the property assessment rolls) rather than be appointed by the mayor with city council consent.
I can totally see the evidence of all the public input Meyland brags about within those four recommendations, can’t you? 😂
I also think Meyland’s whining about “the filers” not getting public input is an insult to voter intelligence because it dismisses the important distinction between a city-originated charter review committee and a citizen-initiated petition. Obviously, one is sponsored by the city, and the other is a grassroots effort.
Citizen initiatives don’t use the mechanisms of government to hold city-sponsored meetings to get input. Think about all the petitions you may have signed in a grocery store parking lot. Do you recall any citizen meetings to get input about those petitions? Of course not. Because the petitions you sign are not initiated by the government. It’s moronic to suggest that citizens need to organize town hall meetings somewhere (where?) to get input from the community about an initiative petition. Who would advertise these meetings, the city? Not likely. And if our city officials didn’t care about direct complaints about the HDC from residents over the years, any meeting summaries presented to the council from these hypothetical meetings would have been dismissed by the city council with no action taken, just as council member Ted Quisenberry recently disregarded concerns about the HDC as nothing more than “hearsay.”
Meyland’s (and the former mayors’) dismissive reference to “the filers” was intended to insult my husband and me but is really an attack on every person who signed the petitions to put the charter proposal on the ballot. After all, that’s how a citizen-initiated petition gets the public input Meyland describes. We didn’t just dream something up and demand people vote on it. It required talking to neighbors about the ballot proposal and seeking their support, and I’ll wager multiples more people signed our petitions than ever talked to Meyland’s charter review committee during its one library meeting.
But those people are not important to Scott Meyland, the former mayors, or the “Charming” group. They think it’s much more honorable to brag about being part of a charter review committee that was born of a former mayor’s pique at getting caught running a stealth election campaign that ignored the charter and to attack the petition signers and the people who suffered from HDC abuse for years.
That’s a much more noble endeavor, right Scott?
We love questions! Unlike our opponents, we’ll give you honest answers with lots of evidence to back up what we say. Feel free to send questions to: ClarkstonCharterProposal@gmail.com.
(And if you’re tired of HDC abuse and favoritism, then please consider voting yes on the proposed HDC charter amendment on November 5! And because I’ve just said that and even though I haven’t spent any money, I’m going to add the following text though I’m not sure I have to:
Paid for by Susan Bisio, P.O. Box 1303, Clarkston, MI 48347 with regulated funds.)