November 9, 2020 at 10:26 a.m.
Beating a horse like a broken record
Beating a horse like a broken record
You could say we are beating a dead horse. Or that we sound like a broken record.
However one describes it, it needs to be said yet again: Oneida County needs to fire its corporation counsel, Brian Desmond.
How many taxpayer dollars has his fiascos cost county taxpayers? A lot. How much more will they cost us in the future? A lot, if past is prologue. How many times has he led the county astray on issues ranging from open government to zoning regulations? A lot, and, yes, the past will be prologue there, too.
The man simply is incompetent and deceitful, a dangerous combination at any time, but especially when the public interest is involved.
In the latest situation, it's clear the corporation counsel failed to carry out the duties the zoning committee commanded him to do four years ago - which was to come up with fixes for those parts of the county's sign ordinance he had deemed unconstitutional because they regulate signs by the content they contain.
But four years later, the county found itself with no new ordinance and with no way to control the size of a political sign - which it has every right to do - because of the way the regulation was written. When the zoning department tried to enforce the ordinance against a notorious bad actor who was trying to exploit it for personal gain, Desmond shut down any enforcement.
The corporation counsel also admonished the county's zoning committee, advising they simply could not enforce an unconstitutional ordinance.
Well, of course not. The thing is, it wouldn't have been unconstitutional if Desmond had done the job the zoning committee had asked him to do in the first place.
It's as if he were a car mechanic who warns a driver her brakes are about to fail and, after the driver tells him to fix them, he simply does not do so. Then, when she comes to pick up the car, he tells her she can't because she can't drive a car with bad brakes.
On top of that, he blames her for not getting the brakes fixed.
It all become an endless loop of absurdity. How long would you keep such a mechanic? How long must we keep such a corporation counsel?
The bottom line is, Desmond did not follow the explicit direction the zoning committee had given him. Had he done so, enforcement would have been easy.
But the most egregious thing about Mr. Desmond's conduct at that zoning meeting was he tried to blame the zoning committee, saying the matter had been returned to the committee six months later, on Dec. 7, 2016, and the committee simply hadn't taken action and had not made it a priority.
Too bad the minutes really didn't summarize anything, but the minutes do show the sign ordinance had come back to the committee. So, in effect, Desmond was saying he had done what the committee had asked of them and it was too bad they dropped the ball after that.
What was coming out of Desmond's mouth was nowhere near the truth, as it turns out. For, while there were no substantive minutes to show what had been discussed, there was a recording, and it shows exactly the opposite of what Desmond was claiming.
Indeed, the discussion that day had nothing to do with any constitutional problems with political signs or with any other signs. In fact, political signs were never mentioned and neither was the constitution.
The meeting simply involved zoning director Karl Jennrich educating the committee on the history of the county's regulation of legal pre-existing off premise signs - billboards, essentially. The regulations had come about as a means to prevent the proliferation of large billboards in the county, which was happening in Lincoln County.
At that meeting, committee chairman Scott Holewinski also wanted to know why the county had not eventually brought such signs into compliance, which the ordinance required, and at that point Mr. Desmond made his only contribution, telling the committee that forcing compliance would constitute a takings and thus the county would have to compensate the sign owners.
Nowhere in that meeting were constitutional problems with content-based restrictions on political and other signs discussed, as Desmond contended this year it had been.
And Desmond was not even the one who had put the item that was discussed - legal pre-existing off-premise signs - on the agenda.
Mr. Holewinski did that.
So Mr. Desmond did not lift a finger that day to correct the flawed ordinance, and for the next four years he did nothing, either. He did not perform his duties, and, as might be expected, that lack of due diligence eventually caught up with the county.
Another black eye thanks to Mr. Desmond.
Even more troubling is Mr. Desmond's attempt to mischaracterize the Dec. 7, 2016, meeting to show him carrying out the committee's direction. He says he simply didn't remember the conversation from that day, but that's hard to believe.
Surely when it became an issue this year, Mr. Desmond remembered he had done nothing to fix the ordinance as directed. After all, he's the one who told Mr. Jennrich he could not enforce an unconstitutional ordinance.
And, if he had taken suggestions to fix the ordinance that day back to the committee, surely he would have remembered the committee took no action on those suggestions. Surely that would have been so concerning to a responsible attorney that he would have documented his own efforts to fix an ordinance he knew to be a problem.
But Mr. Desmond has produced no such record. All he did was point to vague meeting minutes and claim he brought the matter back as directed. Fortunately, a recording exists that proves Mr. Desmond's dereliction of duty.
And that is exactly what it does, for he did not carry out the committee's directive that day and, as far as we know, there's no record of him ever doing so. Surely he would have come up with proof had he done it.
Or to say all this another way, if one looks at the agenda, it does not mention political and other non-exempt signs and constitutional issues with them, as the original agenda had back in June of that year. So what makes Mr. Desmond think it was discussed, especially when it was not on the agenda.
Astonishingly, he remembers it was discussed but not what was discussed. It looks like Mr. Desmond is guilty of dereliction of duty and of knowingly trying to mislead the committee about that dereliction, and he should be fired as soon as possible.
One final point as all this relates to open government. Back on Dec. 7, 2016 - the minutes of that meeting were so thin as to be nonexistent - the summary of the discussion of the sign issue was "Discussion only." That's simply not acceptable minutes, and, had a recording of the meeting not existed, would have allowed Mr. Desmond to get away with his charade.
The zoning committee these days does a much better job of actually summarizing the key points of discussion of agenda items, but obviously that was not the case back in 2016. And it's not the case now with many departments.
The county should write an ordinance, or at least a policy, that meeting minutes should summarize the key points each speaker makes. Such a policy would also make for a good state statute.
It would do a better job of relaying to the public what discussion are actually going on - the purpose of meeting minutes, after all - and it would prevent rogue bureaucrats like Mr. Desmond from rewriting history to hide critical information from the public and to cover for their incompetence.
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