Won the Battle ...

The City Council of Marco Island has called for a “special called meeting” on September 28 at 5PM. The purpose is to consider a resolution where “It is anticipated that the Resolution will clarify that there is no intent to seek reimbursement of legal fees from citizens who sign the petition”.

After an initial posting on this blog (“Threats by City Attorney & Others - A Felony - You Decide” 9-20-2006) denoting how city officials appeared to have threatened voters with financial retribution for exercising their right to vote, the citizens of Marco Island became outraged and did what good citizens of a democracy do – expressed their indignation to each other, to the City Council of Marco Island, to the media, and even to state and federal law enforcement authorities.

With such heat that even the City-Council-Can-Do-No-Wrong Political Committee could not dampen, the few reasonable souls remaining on the city council opted to best clarify this matter. Good for them and us, thank you and congratulations.

We presume that the motivation is to assuage the overwhelming anger of the citizen body by claiming it was all a big misunderstanding. We can be equally presumptuous and posit that a felony conviction is perhaps a stronger motivating force, since clarifications by many on this council and nearly all of the staff are decidedly scarce.

So the question becomes ... if a retraction (read: backpedaling) ensues, should the law enforcement pursuit continue? Interesting, isn’t it. Did the words intimidate just one voter? Did the words cause just one person not to sign a petition?

As that decision ferments, we can only hope that some on the council are enlightened as to how they continue to alienate the citizens of Marco Island since governing by threats (or threats through proxy) appears to have backfired.

Then onto the other related questions.

So as to reevaluate their alienation strategy, is the majority of the council going to continue the truly Byzantine decision of pre-paying for legal fees and expenses for council members to fight the recall (read: the will of the people)? Reimbursement a priori – whether they win or loose? Reimbursement whether the three city council members “think” they have to contest the recall through the courts or not (they don’t have to – unless they need to be reimbursed for writing a 200 word rebuttal to the recall petitions).

So as to reevaluate their alienation strategy, is the majority of the council going to continue belittling the efforts of its citizens – just because they don’t agree with those citizens?

The citizens appear to have won the battle, irrespective of how the city and the council spin the retraction. They could appear magnanimous and claim that they have decided not to purse seeking the restitution of the fees and costs “for the good of the community”, or appear to once again hide behind the worst that society has to offer by claiming that they are not seeking the restitution of the fees and costs “based on the advise of our lawyer”, or if a miracle happens “that was a real stupid thing to say, we are sorry and we did not mean it and we are not doing that and shame on the people who said it.”

The last one would sure go a long way to healing this community.

But it is still up to the citizens to show up, express their opinions and views and thereby enforce our representative form of government. And with the grace of good fortune, our elected officials can represent us.

See you there!