Week in Review: An Inconvenience to Consider
Mayoral Appointments, Property Taxes, Lifeways
Week in Review
City Council, Tuesday, January 16
New Member on the Election Commission
Mayor Stockford exercised his mayoral authority, choosing to appoint Ginger Novak to the Election Commission rather than reappointing Penny Swan. In the subsequent public comment period, Swan called it a “sneaky move” and “bad politics.” She continued:
What kind of state rep are you going to make if you pull shit—shenanigans—like this? It’ll come around to bite you.
When the committee appointments came around later in the meeting, some on the Council responded to Ms. Swan’s remarks:
Stockford: “Nothing against Penny, but if she wants to be a political activist . . . I don’t want her involved in our elections . . . Nobody’s entitled to committee appointments.”
Stuchell: “The work Penny does . . . is commendable. But at the same time, we need to pull in fresh faces as well.”
Swan got the last word, accusing Stockford of violating her First Amendment rights.1
Garbage Contracts
To our shame, we ignored this agenda item in last week’s preview of the meeting after assuming that the city employees recommended the cheapest trash pickup option to the Council. But we assumed wrongly. The city received two bids, one from Lakeshore Recycling Systems, the current service, and another from Granger. The difficulty in choosing was complicated by the fact that each five year contract includes climbing prices throughout the five years, and also different prices for the various ancillary services, such as bulk trash or dumpster offerings. It turns out that nobody knew which bid was superior. Here are a few intelligible moments from a largely confused and garbled discussion:
Paladino tried to figure out which was the cheaper option: “Obviously I don’t want the city to bear any more costs, but if we’re talking about five times the cost for the residents so the city can save some, I think we might want to go with the increased savings for the residents.”
Socha pointed to the fees and rescheduling difficulties that come with changing services: “There’s an inconvenience to consider. . . if we do end up changing.”
After making little headway in its investigation, the Council went for the blind vote, all in favor of staying with LRS.
Property Taxes in the City of Hillsdale
Listed below are the ways in which your local property taxes2 are spent. You pay 59.2 mills per year between the city and the county if you live in Hillsdale proper. This means you pay $59.2 per $1000 of taxable value, or, $8,880 per year on a $150,000 property. In other words, you are charged a 5.92% annual fee (based on a floating property assessment, conducted by the city) to own the property you allegedly own. Here’s where that money goes:
Hillsdale Proper: 46.4 mills
Hillsdale Community Schools: 25.8 mills (44% of your total local property taxes if you live in Hillsdale)
City Operating Expenses: 12.2 mills (21%)
Leaf Collection: 4 mills (6.8%)
City Streets: 2.4 mills (4%)
Public Safety: 1 mill (1.7%)
Library 1 mill (1.7%)
County-wide: 12.9 mills
County Operating Expenses: 4.9 mills (8.3%)
Independent School District: 4.6 mills (7.7%)3
Various Hillsdale County “Services”: 3.4 mills (5.7%)4
Permit us a few observations:
Total percent of local property taxes spent on Hillsdale Community Schools plus the ISD: 51.7% ($4,560/year for a $150,000 property).
Operating expenses, county and city, account for a mere 25.9% of your annual property taxes ($3,885).
The city spends nearly twice as much on leaf collection as it does on roads.
The county spends 41% of its property tax revenue on things unrelated to operations.
Lifeways
In 1993, Hillsdale County agreed with Northern Health Foundation to have a new building built for the Jackson Hillsdale Community Mental Health Services Board (later to become an “authority”). This was the precursor to Lifeways.
The following Board of Commissioners minutes from 1993 demonstrate this:
March 3, 1993
March 16, 1993
By April ground had been broken on the construction project and the building was completed in early July of 1993.
Although the discussion was with Northern Health Foundation, the actual agreement was made with the “Hillsdale Community Mental Health Building Corporation.” This corporation was created for this building project and is under the Northern Health Foundation. It was incorporated on March 18, 1993.
In 2002, the County decided to refinance the mortgage on the property. See the 2002 original resolution here.
According to the 2002 resolution,
the Original Note was issued “on behalf of” the County, within the meaning of Section 103 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, pursuant to a Resolution approved by the Board of County Commissioners on March 16, 1993 (the “Original Resolution”),which specifically provides that the County has no financial responsibility whatsoever for payments due under the Original Note, which is primarily payable from and secured by lease payments made by the HealthDepartment to the Issuer.”
That is, Lifeways would pay Northern Health via the Hillsdale Community Mental Health Building Corporation until the mortgage was paid off. The County conveyed the deed of the land to the HCMHBC for building in 1993. The mortgage, even after the refinancing, was scheduled to paid off November 1, 2013.
So who owns the property now?
The 2002 resolution states that
Later in the resolution it is assumed that the title will return to the County:
Whether the County, the Northern Health Foundation, or someone else currently possesses the deed, we do not know. To be continued . . .
Upcoming Events
County Commissioners, Tuesday, January 23
External Links
“Specialty courts help. They are necessary for the individual and without them many people would not overcome their demons. I do not believe however that they have a significant impact on how the class of crime affects society.” Hillsdale County Prosecutor Neal Brady, speaking to a rejuvenated Corey Murray about the cartel-abetted “methamphetamine epidemic.”
“The community of Hillsdale values and shows strong support to have a quality public school system. I look forward to seeing the continued success and accomplishments of the students at Hillsdale Community Schools.” Hillsdale Community Schools Superintendent Shawn Vondra is retiring.
“It is common knowledge in [Hillsdale] that the local Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican churches are all bursting at the seams, with many other denominations also experiencing growth in membership (except for, of course, the Episcopalians).” Luke Robson. Ouch!
“There has been some talk that certain members of the board are trying to push a Hillsdale curriculum and that’s not my intent. But Hillsdale has laid out materials including unit outlines, topics for units and sample questions that are free.” A member of the Brandywine Community Schools Board of Education curriculum committee.5
“It’s no secret that many school libraries have become reflections of politicized librarians. . . . gatekeeping is part of a larger movement among librarians known as ‘critical librarianship.’” James Fishback, writing at The Free Press.
“The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday let stand lower court rulings that allow a transgender boy to use the restroom that matches his gender identity, a win for the student. . . . The ACLU of Indiana . . . had argued that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction over the case because A.C. had graduated from middle school and was now in high school, where a different policy (and modified injunction) applies, and that the case was a ‘poor vehicle’ to resolve the legal questions.” Chris Geidner.
“Now, bracing for Trump’s potential return, a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater to his political needs.” NBC.
“The Board's decision will ensure that taxpayer funds can no longer be used to promote DEI on Florida’s 28 state college campuses.” Florida Department of Education.
“Ever since I began my project to walk around the world, it has always been jarring to come home to the US, often from much poorer countries — in this case Bulgaria — to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse . . . in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.” Chris Arnade.
“The real scandal of Davos isn’t that it’s taking over the world. It’s that it’s failing . . . far from imposing this agenda on a captive world, the Davos elites are wringing their hands as the dream slowly dies.” Walter Russell Mead.
“The Slavophiles presented a mythologized account of Russian history, this time claiming for Russia a fundamentally peaceful character in contrast with the barbaric violence of the West. Fundamentally spiritual, not political, Russians neither want nor should have anything to do with government; ‘their sense of freedom was inner, spiritual; indeed, true freedom can exist only there,’ never in civic life. Autocracy permitted Russians to live the highest form of life human beings could achieve, confining the dirty business of politics to ‘the one’ and his colleagues.” Will Morrissey reviews Richard Pipes’ Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture.
“The Church’s exercise of her legal authority has often been unjust. Not everything about her painted as black has been a legend, and integralism is not in the business of claiming otherwise. . . . Rather integralism explains where problems with the morality of ecclesial legislation may really lie – but other than by relying on a liberal myth of some absolute right to liberty of belief and conscience, which states have never respected in relation to what they take to be truths that really matter. There is no such right, not even in the case of religion.” Thomas Pink, writing at The Josias.
“Gerwig lures audiences into the theater by appealing to residual fondness for a piece of plastic but then blasts them with propaganda.” Peter Tonguette (and Samuel Goldman) is wrong about Barbie.6
Stockford seems to us to have been particularly judicious in this matter. Do we want a fickle, vengeful, electorally embittered and camera-trigger-happy citizen who wantonly tells her deepest secrets to a trolling New York Times to supervise Our Democracy in Hillsdale?
Page 208.
The ISD aligns approximately with the county, but the boundaries are not quite the same.
LifeWays, two different “Senior Service” mills, and “County Medical Care Facility Debt.”
In related news, the Hillsdale-affiliated Ashley River Classical Academy in South Carolina intends to open its doors in 2024. Former Clinton staffers are branding the charter school a Moms for Liberty project, and they’ve begun working up dossiers on board members and employees.
How is it possible to watch that movie and think Gerwig is filming in praise of the “desert of the real” that is Barbieland?
**An Inconvenience or an Inconvenient Truth?**
I understand that your blog tends to lean towards the sensational, but there’s a fine line between colorful writing and outright dishonesty. Your piece on Mayor Stockford and his so-called authority is a case in point.
According to the city charter, it’s the Mayor’s job to appoint committee members, with the council’s approval. These appointments should be transparent – the applications are supposed to be in the packet for everyone to see before the council meeting. But this time, the process wasn’t just overlooked; it was completely ignored.
The mayor didn’t nominate anyone in time for the meeting, so the usual reappointment process just rolled on. If he had followed the rules, there wouldn’t be an issue. Blaming the City Clerk for his oversight is a low blow and a lazy excuse.
Now, about the missing application: if the council had stuck to the rules, they would’ve asked to see it. Is the appointee even a resident of the city, as required by charter? Keeping the public in the dark like this is exactly why the rule about applications exists.
Your article missed out some crucial details. Yes, the mayor mentioned Ms. Swan's political activism, but he only brought that up after she made him angry during the meeting. Before that, he simply said she had served long enough – no mention of activism. The irony of course is the Mayor is well aware of Swan’s political activism, which often benefited him over the last decade and the entirety of her past appointments. Yet this “activism” only became an issue when it didn’t benefit him and Swan spoke out against his political behavior.
Also, let’s not forget the mayor’s own political baggage. His group, of which he is an officer of “America First,” had significant fines accessed right before this whole fiasco. That seems pretty relevant to me, but you left it out. Swan of course is closely connected to the group that prevailed against the Mayor’s faction.
The mayor could have been more subtle. He could have just thanked Ms. Swan for her service and left her name off the agenda. But no, he had to go and remove her during the meeting, making it look like a personal vendetta. It’s one thing to say a political activist shouldn’t be on an election board – and I might even agree with that – but when the replacement is also a political activist and chair of the local Women's Republican group, it doesn’t add up.
Being vengeful is a bad look for an elected official. I've been through a similar situation with the city and wish it had been as clear-cut as this. The mayor needs to be held accountable, both in the next election and perhaps even in court. He’s a textbook example of what’s wrong with politics today.
As for the “Hillsdale Review,” I get why you might use a pen name. Writing controversial opinions can be tough. But you need to back up what you say with facts and stand by your words. The real world won’t be as forgiving as your college bubble. Time to step up.