Week in Review: the Scarecrow Affair

Week in Review

City Council, February 5

Corecoyle LLC Update (packet, 135)

In October, a Corecoyle Composites representative came before the Council to justify the continuation of a specially-issued tax abatement called an Industrial Facilities Exemption. At that meeting, the representative promised that the business would open “soon.” Some on the Council have grown tired of this story.¹

• Sharp: “He came here three months ago promising that things would be rolling, that we’d have jobs in there. . . There’s nothing going on there. Nothing. And we said, ‘let’s give them six months.’ And we’re almost there.”

• Lawyer Flenderson, in his un-quotable way, urged the Council to be patient and informed them that Corecoyle had won its lawsuit and was engaged in the long process of collecting damages, with which it could begin operating.

The presentation was an update only, so Council took no action.

Scarecrow Fest Fees

The organizers of the downtown Scarecrow Festival wished to have part of their event fees—which were raised substantially in a recent ordinance update—waived. They had applied for a permit to use the streets downtown between the introduction of the proposed ordinance, and its adoption. The city proceeded to charge the event organizers according to the fee schedule of the recently-adopted ordinance, amounting to approximately $500 for the initial fee, along with a subsequent $280 charge. The Council deliberated in an attempt to determine the most just fee:

• Stockford: “I think we should waive whatever outstanding fees there are [the $280 addition]. And I think they had a benefit to the city of Hillsdale because they brought people downtown.”

• Flenderson continually tried to tell the Council to frame the resolution waiving the fees as something for the good of the public, rather than as boon to private businesses. Only then would it be legally defensible. He had some difficulty in getting this point across.²

• Paladino: “I don’t know that we should even charge the $500. I’m for raising the fees, as I’ve said multiple times, but. . . just laws need to be clear, they need to be steady, they need to be enforced over a period of time, enforced equally on everybody. So I’d prefer just to charge them the original fee [$45].”

Vear and Sharp opposed the motion to charge the original $45 fee; Sharp shook his head in disgust. All others approved.

MDOT Contract — Griswold/St. Joe Streets

Council authorized the City Manager to execute and sign the MDOT grant contract for the repaving of these roads in town, financed in part by Special Assessment.

National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution Proclamation (203)

This “non-political women’s service organization” rejoiced not once, but twice in “our nation’s rich history and diversity.”

Public Comment

• Jack McClain blew the whistle on the string lights that are strung across several downtown streets: “There’s no permit for that electrical work. . . I don’t know why certain people are above the rules and regulations of the city. . . When I lived on Norwood Street, I would have given anything to stretch a cord across the street and talk to my friend on my radio chat radios.”³

Upcoming Events

County Board of Commissioners, Tuesday, February 13

External Links

• “I was initially conflicted on this, until I thought of the 8th amendment which protects those charged with a crime against imposing excessive bail. . . . Judge Lisznyai asked me to serve on the board as a media representative which is allowed under the advisory board’s governing rules, and we’ve been meeting since last summer.” Corey Murray self-reports as a member of the Community Corrections Advisory Board.

• “Barron Trump should apply to and then attend Hillsdale College this coming fall.” Josiah Lippincott wants to be Barron’s Bannon.

• “I will say, it’s getting harder and harder, in any organization, Kiwanis, Rotary, Lions, Masons, or you name it, to get young people to join. Young people don’t seem to be as socially oriented. I think they’re more computered.” Our local Masonic lodge is struggling to recruit a new generation.

• “We have the capability to do any and all live sports, including Charger games, which students have really been loving. We are hoping to do a lot of meet-the-team events with the college.” The Underdogs sports bar has opened inside Market House.

• “I’m waiting for somebody smarter to give us a good idea on how to spend the money.” Michigan counties are struggling to spend hundreds of millions in opioid settlement money.

• “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Special Counsel Robert K. Hur.

• “Under these circumstances, it is impossible for Americans to recover a shared conception of the common good. . . . The result is that postmodern Cave-dwellers know their fellow citizens mostly as caricatures, and themselves very little. They know nothing of the transcendent truth above them. They have the vaguest notions of the past, the soil from which they have sprung. And it is not just the force of habit that holds them motionless in their part of the gloomy pit. It is also the natural longing to find meaning in actual human community, a desire that grows stronger the more it is frustrated by artificial substitutes like social media ‘friends.’” Jacob Howland.

• “The truth is that evolution and natural selection have quite straightforward explanations; in fact, from that perspective, a much more puzzling question is why human females don’t die immediately after menopause, as so many other animals do. But then you realise that Shanahan and her researchers are totally uninterested in any answer that might position the female body as part of the natural world. When they ask ‘why…?’, all they really want to know is what mechanisms and environments immediately cause the limited shelf-life of human ovaries, so that they can then try to fiddle about with the process.” Kathleen Stock.⁴

• “I wish there had been more open conversations. But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.” The New York Times has allowed destransitioned voices to appear in its pages.

• “Attorney General Kris Kobach announced today that several Kansas school districts allow employees to hide from parents the fact that a student may be using a different name or pronouns at school.” Press release from the office of the Kansas AG.

• “Hardly anyone thinks of Thomas Jefferson as a disciple of Machiavelli . . .” Daniel McCarthy.

• “As with Hogwarts, it depends on conservative foundations to provide both social continuity and stability and for its decorous aesthetic and cultural backdrop. However its own ideological tenets are corrosive to these foundations and prevent anything genuine being done to preserve them. . . . If we were to imagine the Hogwarts of 2024, it would be busily constructing the new Sheikh Aziz school of modern magic to solve its funding crisis while simultaneously tearing itself apart over whether muggle studies should be a graduation requirement.” Will Solfiac on “Harry Potter and the bourgeois bohemian dream.”

• “Neo-integralists are teachers of evil. Many do not mean to be; but some do. They must be treated as such. They must be hounded out of conservative institutions, made pariahs in religious circles, and alienated from polite discourse on politics. Associations with neo-integralism need to be automatically expelled. There is no other way to respond, and there is nothing wrong with doing this.” James M. Patterson calls for an Inquisition.

Farewell

Fauxglin intended to spend this week composing a mighty ode in dazzingly ironic praise of local government corruption aficionado, Jeff King, but as we encountered more and more of that man’s unexpectedly tedious nyah-nyahs — gasping, emoji-laden breaths spent in service of a riot of intentional and unintentional mis- and non-readings — the muse departed from us in disgust.

In place of this delight, we would draw your attention to the recent publication of George of Cappadocia’s Chivalry: An Ideal Whose Time Has Come Again, a book we recommend to our readers and plan to review in these very pages in the coming weeks.

1. The company is reportedly tied up in litigation regarding roof damage of the facility suffered during the 2021 tornado. Upon collecting damages from that lawsuit, rumor is that it will proceed as planned.

2. Downtown businesses and adjacent operations are the favorite children of local government, which one sometimes believes exists for their sake alone.

3. McClain “FOIA’d the city” in order to obtain this information.

4. See also New Polity’s recent podcast on the gender problem.