James Tamm, the attorney assigned by the Michigan Municipal League Liability and Property Pool (MMLLPP), City Attorney Tom Ryan, and all of the current and former city council members who decided to fight rather than resolve my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit and my husband’s Open Meetings Act (OMA) lawsuit (with the exception of Sue Wylie, Scott Reynolds, Rick Detkowski, and former mayor Steve Percival) showed us who they are. You must always watch them like a hawk, because their actions clearly communicate that they prefer to hide things rather than operate in an open and transparent manner. As poet Maya Angelo once said, “when people show you who they are, believe them.”
Our city government has always claimed to care about transparency. After what’s happened over the last five years, color me skeptical. I would remind you that former councilmember Sharron Catallo said that the reason that the city should continue to fight over providing the 18 records that I’d requested under the FOIA was because the city wanted to have the ability to have papers delivered to the attorney but not the city, so they won’t be public records (September 11, 2017 city council meeting, at time mark 1:48:32). Translation: We like keeping secrets from constituents, so please be sure to help us in our efforts by delivering things we don’t want the public to know about directly to Ryan who will hide them from the public.
Ryan was all in on this method of keeping secrets. He told us that he was going to control the information coming out of city hall and that he alone would decide when something “became” a city record. That worked out well for them – until my lawsuit.
It’s not surprising to me that Ryan’s malpractice carrier contributed to the settlement in my FOIA case; malpractice carriers don’t pay unless there’s been malpractice exposure. This wasn’t Ryan’s first screw up. In 2015, he exposed four council members (including current mayor Eric Haven) to civil and criminal liability by asking that a city council meeting be illegally closed, and the closed session could not have occurred without Ryan’s active participation. Afterward, Ryan insisted that the meeting was lawfully closed (it wasn’t), and he was improperly involved in the resulting in the Open Meetings Act lawsuit, which was also handled by Tamm. The city council received a warning letter for their misconduct under the OMA because a reporter from the Clarkston News (correctly) filed a complaint with the Oakland County Sheriff over the OMA violation. Had there been any punishment for these unlawful actions, it would have fallen on the shoulders of the four council members who voted to close the meeting, not on Ryan. And yet somehow, he’s managed to keep his job.
Ryan couldn’t represent the city at facilitation in the FOIA case due to his conflict (a conflict that should have been obvious to him five years ago). This meant that the city had to hire outside representation (Mark Peyser), but Peyser’s higher hourly rate for legal fees wasn’t covered by insurance. Now that the city has had an opportunity to work with a professional, I hope that the city council considers replacing Ryan with someone who isn’t going to drag them into lawsuits that begin with more bad advice and continue on because of Ryan’s inflated ego. Is Ryan’s deceptively low hourly rate really worth all this trouble? (I’ll write more on Ryan’s billing practices in another post.)
Despite all of this, I have noticed that the city has taken some positive steps. For example, the city council really does seem to want to close meetings correctly now, and if a lawsuit to force them to do that was what was necessary, then it was time well spent. I would note that all of the meeting closures that have occurred since the OMA lawsuit ended have been closed under the guidance of other attorneys, not Ryan. While I’m not in favor of anything that’s not transparent, there are times when the city council is allowed to meet in closed session – and when they do, they should do it correctly. (One can only hope that Ryan has been paying attention and now knows not only how to properly close a meeting but also what constitutes a valid reason for doing so.) The city has also been receptive to suggestions from constituent Chet Pardee regarding how the city’s website can be improved regarding financial transparency, and the city manager and city clerk have worked hard to make it better. And my Clarkston Sunshine page (established to provide detailed summaries of city meetings) wasn’t up all that long before the city decided to start providing more detailed information in city council minutes, something they haven’t done for years. I applaud all of these efforts.
If Tamm, Ryan, the city council, or Clarkston government thought that everything that has happened over the last five years would crush me and make me go away, I can assure all of them that it had the exact opposite effect. I will be watching more closely and will continue to speak out – loudly. They haven’t intimidated me any way whatsoever.
Moving forward, I’m particularly interested in what the city is going to do about its unconstitutional sign ordinance – unconstitutional because, among other reasons, it tries to regulate “political” signs – a content restriction that violates the first amendment. The city council has been told on multiple occasions that the sign ordinance violates the first amendment and have done nothing to remedy that. And, our Planning Commission has been much too busy making recommendations that benefit Curt Catallo’s restaurants – at Curt Catallo’s request. After all, it’s more important to give the exclusive use of the end of Church Street to Honcho and to allow people to walk around Main Street with alcoholic drinks in cute little cups than to deal with a clearly unconstitutional ordinance that will eventually result in another lawsuit. 🙄
The Michigan Supreme Court decision in my FOIA case has given Clarkston residents something that they didn’t have before – the ability to pry records out of Ryan’s hands that he would prefer we not see. (You’re welcome.) I’ve noticed that Ryan doesn’t describe the correspondence that he sends or receives in his legal services bills anymore. Perhaps he thinks that’s a way of avoiding FOIA requests for specific documents, but don’t let that deter you. If you want to know what he’s been up to, send the city a FOIA request for records relating to your area of interest. Address it to the FOIA Coordinator at city hall and be sure to note that you want records concerning a specific subject for a specific time period, including those communications that are kept within the office of the city attorney. And, should you ever feel the need to file a lawsuit against the city, contact me before you file that complaint – I have some suggestions that just might limit the amount of bullshit the city’s lawyers will be able to throw at you.
And so, Clarkston government, if you want to know the effect that five years of attacks have had on this particular wife, mother, taxpayer and constituent, I leave you with this:
The Oak Tree
(by Johnny Ray Ryder Jr)
A mighty wind blew night and day
It stole the oak tree’s leaves away
Then snapped its boughs and pulled its bark
Until the oak was tired and stark
But still the oak tree held its ground
While other trees fell all around
The weary wind gave up and spoke.
How can you still be standing Oak?
The oak tree said, I know that you
Can break each branch of mine in two
Carry every leaf away
Shake my limbs, and make me sway
But I have roots stretched in the earth
Growing stronger since my birth
You’ll never touch them, for you see
They are the deepest part of me
Until today, I wasn’t sure
Of just how much I could endure
But now I’ve found, with thanks to you
I’m stronger than I ever knew
And now I circle back to where I started. The FOIA lawsuit chapter is now closed. Unfortunately, without continued vigilance and pressure, the people who make up our local government have shown us that they won’t necessarily do the right thing unless they’re forced to do it. The operative word is “our” local government, because it belongs to us, not any errant employee, official, mayor, or council member who thinks that s/he is entitled to keep things from us because it’s “city business” and not “our business.” It is all our business. The book has yet to be written, but hopefully, it will only be a novella – because I truly hope that city officials will make their best efforts to always choose transparency over secrecy going forward.
I can dream, can’t I? But until we get there, I’ll be watching Clarkston government like a hawk. And you should too.
(The End. )