This is Not Okay
On June 27, the conduct of the Orono City Council meeting, chaired by Mayor Dennis Walsh, deteriorated to a new low. Anyone attending or watching the Orono City Council meeting that evening saw and heard Mayor Walsh mock two former mayors making public comments. He called them clowns. Later, Walsh hid derisively behind a newspaper as a disgruntled citizen staged a silent protest at the podium.
You can review this ugly, deleterious breakdown of civic governance and civil discourse at this link on the city’s archive of the meeting here.
Once again, citizens of Orono and others who have viewed this betrayal of city government – by elected city government officials – are left to ask Why – and Where?
Why does Mayor Walsh exhibit such cynical contempt for former fellow mayors? Where is his self-respect, human decency and self-esteem? Why would he conduct himself in such a humiliating fashion, humiliating to him, Orono residents and the city itself? Aside from voting him out of his job in 2024, where is the quickest cure for this egregious behavior and disdain for the democratic process?!
Why should you care? Because elected city government is where your voice in every action or inaction that takes place in our fair city is realized – or not.
Recently, Jim Cornell on the Stand Up for Property Rights, Big Woods and Wetlands Facebook page expressed what many of us feel when watching these terrible interactions between the council’s leader and its citizenry. He also breaks down the proceedings if you don’t want to watch it yourself.
Jim wrote, “Despite the Orono City Council’s attempts to stifle public comment (including reducing the time allotted to each citizen for public comment and moving public comments from the start of the meeting to the end), some folks are still trying to get some responsible leadership out of the current administration. If you live in Orono, PLEASE take the time to see how our city is being run by watching the most recent city council meeting, featuring among other things the mayor reading a newspaper. If you don’t want to sit through the entire thing, here are the times of some highlights of the mayor’s behavior at that meeting (let's just let it speak for itself):
1:05 – Mocking, laughing at, talking over and gaveling and shouting down a former Orono Mayor
1:09 – Mocking and talking over a former Long Lake Mayor calling the mayor’s comment “B.S.”
1:10 – Referring to these former Mayors as clowns, “Are there any more clowns that would like to come up tonight?”
1:10 – Mocking and talking over a citizen who was reading a statement from the Director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology regarding steps Orono has taken to put in a mountain bike path in a surviving portion of the Big Woods
1:13 – Mocking a citizen who chose to use his 3:00 of public comment for a silent protest by asking the citizen “Is that all you got?” and proceeding to read a newspaper.
This is the governance we are paying (dearly) for.
How close are we to repeating inside the Orono council chambers the outright brawls that have taken place at various junctures around the world over issues that opposing parties can’t agree on. For example:
Monterrey, Mexico 2008 – A dispute over a proposed new road: on YouTube, here.
Or The Nigerian House of Representatives, 2010, where a free-for-all fight breaks out on the floor of the Nigerian House of Representatives, as members who opposed to the embattled speaker of the house, Dimeji Bankole, tried to introduce a motion for his impeachment, on YouTube, here.
Or the Ukrainian Parliament, 2014, where fistfights erupted between communist lawmakers and members of the right-wing Svoboda (Freedom) Party as tempers rose over pro-Russian demonstrations. We know how this ended eight years later with the Russian invasion last winter, Time article, here.
Or is this dangerous behavior inside our council chambers sadly more of the same political dysfunction and demagoguery that drove “ the angry and armed mob” to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021?
None of this is okay.