Second of two parts
Re “Council in a Conundrum Over Longtime Tormenter”
When the gadfly Tony Pappas pleaded/demanded of the City Council last Monday that they retain outdated fiscal documents that City Hall wanted to digitize for a cool $20,000, Vice Mayor Mehaul O’Leary produced what he regarded as a compromise solution:
Rent an apartment for a year. Store the bulky, space-eating files there.
Since the meeting, where Mr. Pappas staged one of his most dramatic performances, the Council has been criticized for yielding any ground to an activist seen widely as an extremist.
There has been plenty of talk in the intervening days about how the Council members should respond to Mr. Pappas in future appearances.
Figuring a Way Out
“This is a tough subject,” said Mr. O’Leary. “We are dealing with somebody whom I believe does not have the interests of the public at heart. He feels as if he has a pulpit where he can chastise and accuse us of wrongdoing. Regularly.”
The Vice Mayor would like to resurrect a former agenda item related to how Council meetings should operate, a legacy from Mark Scott’s brief tenure as City Manager before he returned to his hometown of Fresno last spring.
“I take offense to how he treats the City Clerk when he wants the microphone,” Mr. O’Leary said. “He snaps his fingers and goes ‘Microphone.’ Many little things about him upset me, how he treats other human beings.
“It is insulting when he calls us by our last name.”
The Vice Mayor is developing a new strategy.
“Should I be made Mayor next April,” he said, “I am formulating a process by which I can control the room. It will be a lot tighter than it is now. There will be more decorum. There will be more rules-of-engagement.
“What is going on now makes for a show instead of a civilized discussion.”
Mr. O’Leary was asked if he would like to take back anything he said last Monday.
“I probably should not have engaged him and referred to him. It gives him credibility. I probably won’t go down that road again.”
As for the rebuffed attempt to digitize old financial papers, Mr. O’Leary said the item should not have been brought back a second straight week, especially since it set off alarms within a half-dozen activists the week before.
“We already had had the discussion,” he said. “Keep the documents and figure out later what you want to do about them.
“”The subject never should have been on the agenda. I didn’t realize these were the same documents when I read the Consent Calendar (where multiple items, considered foregone conclusions, are placed and voted on in a single motion).
“I probably would have advised not to bring it back. Leave them. If somebody wants to inspect them, they will be there.
“We already had given in to the perception we might be hiding something, which we were not.”
Documents have been dumped, legally, openly, for years.
“Yes,” said Mr. O’Leary, “but sometimes, just as in ‘Lord of the Flies,’ there can be a frenzy. That is what happened here.”
