Tag: Gwenn Hauck

No, the new and much more damaging development is the trend of non-amigo dissenters being so blatantly and systematically personally misused and marginalized. More and more often, we find, that when an important issue or potential policy or statutory change is beginning to be considered by the Village Council, non-Amigo VC members are being intentionally kept out of the loop during substantive face-to-face meetings, telephone calls and email exchanges during which important village business is being discussed. Many of these events involve one or two Amigos, thereby representing a violation of the spirit, if not also the letter, of the Sunshine Law but some represent clear violations because they involve all three Amigos.

For example, former Councilwoman Walsh was CONSTANTLY being kept completely in the dark by all three Amigos during the run up to contemplated policy or statutory changes (as was Councilman Riche, BTW). In fact, this is the very issue she was complaining about, on the record at a public VC meeting, when the current Mayor, apparently feeling the heat and wishing to lash out and intimidate his recalcitrant colleague, accused her, without any basis in the facts or the law, of using the influence of her position on the VC to try to fix her own parking ticket. This is classic uncivil mud slinging.

Another example of this corrosive and damaging behavior is when the two Amigos were enthusiastically participating in their official capacity in the first ‘civility forum’, thinking they were in the clear, and the third Amigo unexpectedly showed up and used the public microphone to officiously advance the Amigo agenda, thereby pushing the meeting, already arguably covered by the Public Meetings Act (Sunshine Law), very clearly into that category. This shows contempt for the law. More distinctly uncivil behavior.

A third example, very recent, is when a typical up-to-no-good Amigo seemingly intentionally and deviously misled Councilwoman Knudsen into believing she needed to recuse herself from a VC work session relating to proposed changes to a law relating to village hiring practices because of her relationship to two pending local job applicants when the law required no such thing. Only after the meeting took place and Ms. Knudsen read the transcript did she determine the very wrong turn done to her by her VC colleague. Where does this behavior fall on the civility scale?

of course, the practice of figuratively knee-capping non-Amigos is not necessarily restricted to attacks on current VC colleages. This is a reality to which current Councilman Sedon can attest, having been forced to choose between his job as a reporter at a Staten Island newspaper and his continued candidacy for a seat on the Village council after an as-yet-unnamed individual apparently maliciously reached out to the editor and suggested that an unavoidable conflict of interest existed (hmm…seems like a pattern…). Can anyone think of something more uncivil than this, short of unjustified physical violence?

These developments constitute real damage because they suggest that anyone who, for whatever reason, opposes or threatens to oppose any current or future Three Amigos policy position or priority, will pay a heavy and a very personal price for their unauthorized dissent. Good potential VC candidates are presumably also intelligent and reasonably savvy and could very well be intimidated into refraining for throwing their hat into the ring in the first place. Moreover, effective, honest, well-meaning and therefore objectivey valuable current VC members are understandably caused by such behavior to re-think their continued participation in local government, meaning that they might not seek re-election when their term as Council member expires.

Surely this qualifies as “real damage.”

So I ask you, What’s in your conscience?