Why must disagreement
be treated as disagreeable?
Old habits die hard. Monday night’s Marion City Council meeting harkened to the dark days of David Mayfield, Todd Heitschmidt, and others who too often expressed contempt for those — especially women — who dared to offer differing opinions.
During public comment Monday, Mayor Mike Powers interrupted Ruth Herbel after she had been talking for 4 minutes 7 seconds, saying in a sarcastic tone: “You’re way over your time.”
It was 4 minutes 27 seconds into a presentation by the next speaker, Brent Miles, before Powers interrupted. And that interruption was much gentler. Powers quietly spoke Miles’ name and gestured with a finger to wrap it up.
Later, Herbel attempted to challenge Powers’ interpretation that That One Place was a brick-and-mortar business even though its kitchen is a food truck.
Powers’ answer was cutting and dismissive.
“We’re not going to have this argument,” he told Herbel. “We’re not going to do it. You’re not on the council anymore. We’re not gonna do it. I’m sorry. We have to make these decisions.”
By “we,” he meant the five council members enthroned at the front of the room, rather than gathered around a conference table as Hillsboro’s city council does when it meets.
The notion of a small “we” making all decisions seems to be the attitude not just of Powers but of many others who have served as mayor and council members before him.
Rather than practice what they preach with mantras like “Marion: Stronger Together,” they want everything left up to them, cut off advice from citizens who don’t agree with them, and don’t take advantage of boards and commissions with expertise to properly handle such laborious tasks as hammering out details of food truck ordinances. Doing so took the council nearly an hour to do Monday night. And then, the basis of most of their decisions was not experience or research but gut instinct.
The council’s self-imposed limit of tolerating a citizen speaker for no more than three minutes was designed to ensure that everyone who wanted to speak had a chance.
It wasn’t as if there was a line of people wanting to comment at Monday night’s meeting. More city police officers were in the audience than there were citizens asking to talk. And the city has only three officers.
A city led by a council with very little experience can use all the expertise, opinions, and advice citizens and former officials can offer.
That’s particularly true when the council’s support staff is similarly inexperienced and often not even present, as was the case Monday night, when the city administrator, attorney, treasurer, public works director, and electric supervisor all conspicuously were absent.
It might forget, as it did with its food truck ordinance Monday night, to provide any limits on where they may set up, meaning one could be coming soon to a residential neighborhood near you.
What the mayor would have heard if he had listened to Herbel or referred the food truck question to the planning and zoning commission, which originally wanted to research such rules, is that the one thing a city can’t legally do is put its thumb on the scale and make it harder for non-residents to compete with local businesses unless there’s a valid reason for such restrictions.
Treating residents differently for such things as peddler licenses is rooted in public safety. A community has the right to limit how many unfamiliar and potentially threatening strangers might be going door to door. That logic doesn’t apply, however, to food trucks if they have passed inspections and licensing, pay taxes, and don’t create traffic nuisances.
Whatever ordinance Marion eventually might adopt after yet more marathon discussions of minutia will be susceptible to being overturned in court because of public comments council members made about adopting it as a way to protect local businesses.
We at the newspaper would love it if laws gave immense advantages to locally owned businesses. We are, after all, the only locally owned newspaper in the county and the only one that, by our competitor’s own admission, provides a full-service product.
Rarely, however, do we get all the business of local concerns, even those that run to city councils asking for protection from competitors that aren’t locally owned and don’t provide a full range of services.
It’s not just celebrated causes like food truck ordinances where more willingness to accept public questioning is needed.
The decaying Locust St. bridge, which the city has been saying for more than four years is in urgent need of repair, wasn’t mentioned at all in the first half of 2024 until Herbel raised a question about it in a letter to the editor.
Two weeks ago, the council discussed putting in a credit card pump for aviation fuel at the airport, as if it were a brand-new idea, without anyone remembering that it had obtained a grant to do just that in 2016 — and as recently as this spring had paid a computer technician to try to repair it.
No one Monday night questioned why the electric department purchased, without council approval, a $1,600 icemaker from Amazon and $335 in water from Carlsons’ Grocery along with $890 in computer equipment, again from Amazon, apparently for just the four members of that department — all in addition to numerous other expenditures, including $10,500 in transformers after the city just replaced a bunch of them.
The expenses may well have been justified. But maybe they weren’t. Asking a question shouldn’t be considered negative. It should be considered evidence of civic involvement.
Rather than regard citizens as troublemakers questioning council members’ power, council members should realize we as a community truly are stronger together, but only when we listen — patiently — to all views.
— ERIC MEYER