January 20, 2022 at 11:03 a.m.
Minding the minds of Oneida County supervisors
Minding the minds of Oneida County supervisors
It won't take long before they demonstrate that they care not one whit about you. It's all about them.
Take this past Tuesday, for instance. The supervisors spent more than a half hour discussing whether to spend $1,300 on an electronic voting system for their meetings, by far the longest discussion about any issue on the agenda.
That's right. They spent significant time discussing whether to keep voting by voice or to push a button. With all the issues around us in 2022, with all the millions of tax dollars they are responsible for, the biggest discussion was not about affordable housing, or the drug epidemic, or social services, or just what really is going in that public health department of theirs.
Neither was it about cutting a needless expense; instead, it was about adding one. Incredibly, supervisors spent their time wallowing in a debate about how to officially record their ongoing recklessness.
To be sure, this time the debate did not fall along clean ideological lines. Mostly conservatives supported keeping a roll call vote, while board liberals wanted to adopt electronic voting, and the whackos, well, they were still the whackos.
But one board liberal, Alan VanRaalte, did not go along, saying correctly that purchasing a system for electronic voting seemed like a solution looking for a problem. Aye, mate, that's what it was.
We'll surely all sleep better at night knowing that a board that never seeks to find solutions to its long-term fiscal problems at least decided to try and solve something - anything - even if it was an imaginary problem.
On the other side, there was the author of the resolution to go to electronic voting, the usually conservative Scott Holewinski, who went off on the crazy again. His positions are usually very solid for taxpayers, but this was not the first time he wandered into liberal lunacy, as he did when he supported a $500,000 tax increase for highways, which voters properly rejected.
This was much less egregious but still. We have seriously wondered why this happens to Holewinski every once in a while, and the only thing we can think of is that he's real thirsty by the time he travels from the saneness of Sugar Camp to Upside-Down land in the county courthouse, where he is then approached by smiling, well-intentioned bureaucrats, or by Bob Mott or Steven Schreier, and offered a sip of their Kool Aid.
You know the rest of that story.
So just what, one may ask, is wrong with electronic voting?
The answer is, nothing much. Nothing much at all. It's just that, as VanRaalte said, it was a solution in search of a problem, and one the county board wasted too much time considering.
Obsessing over the way they record votes was indicative of the disconnect the board has with the people and with the burning issues in our communities. They were actually fiddling while Rome was burning.
Oh, Holewinski tried to offer up that electronic voting would somehow increase efficiency because pushing a button rather than calling the roll would shorten meetings.
Really? By how many seconds?
Actually, probably by none at all. During an electronic vote, the voting is kept open for a certain amount of time, long enough for supervisors to vote one way and change their votes if they desire before the period closes. We can't imagine this period of time will be appreciably shorter than the time it takes to call the roll, and it could be longer.
What is more instructive is to look at the motives of liberals pushing the electronic voting resolution. Liberals like to support anything that spends more money, and this was an example of that, but the principal argument they made is that, because everybody votes at the same time, it would prevent some presumably dim-witted supervisors from seeing how someone else votes and then voting the same way.
Now we would be the last to argue that there are no dim-witted deadweights on the county board. Indeed, many of them are promoted, at one time or another, to county board chairperson. Others merely sleep through their terms and do indeed wake up only long enough to see how their chosen role model votes and to vote the same way.
That really isn't the best way to take a position, but some points are to be made. First, what business is it of any supervisor to try and control how other supervisors make up their minds. That's between them and their voters, who will judge the record of those voting decisions. It's none of Bob Mott's business how a supervisor compiled that record, upset as he might be that Joe Slow always voted the way Jane Conservative did.
But Bob Mott, a liberal, wants to mind other supervisors' minds.
Second, seeing how someone else votes can sometimes be a valid exercise. A thoughtful and engaged supervisor, sitting on the fence after a long debate, might well be influenced in the end by the final judgement of a valued colleague - of a supervisor who has earned respect because of his or her experience and instinct.
There's nothing wrong per se with the shared influences of like-minded supervisors. Indeed, that's why the board bothers to debate issues at all - to influence their colleagues and to persuade them to their position. Sometimes that persuasion comes in the form of a final vote rather than just an argument, and it is no less valid. Indeed, some supervisors argue with their votes rather than with their mouths.
Finally, and this is related to the first point, the motive of board liberals to support this resolution was to curtail such influence, since most of the strong voices on the board - Billy Fried, Jack Sorensen, usually Holewinski - take more conservative positions. If they can't cut off their verbal arguments, liberals could at least hope to cut off the impact of their votes.
As usual, then, the whole electronic voting scheme was undergirded by, if not launched by, an ulterior motive, which is the modus operandi of board liberals.
All this should serve as a warning. That is to say, this silly debate wasn't so silly. It once again demonstrated the disconnect between supervisors and the people, yes, but it also demonstrated that liberals will use the most arcane and seemingly innocuous issues to gain ever more control of the county and our tax dollars.
The explicit warning: If county voters allow the slew of liberals running for board seats this spring to prevail, Tuesday's exercise will be just a prelude to what will be coming down the pike. The county will spend ever more time on ever more grandiose but non-essential government programs and schemes - ever bigger and more expensive solutions to nonexistent problems - than the board does now. The cost, in dollars and in liberty, will be vast.
To avoid that, voters need to make sure they don't allow the organized slate of liberals to win in the spring, and they need to remind a usually reliable friend of the taxpayer, Scott Holewinski, to stay away from the Kool Aid at the courthouse. He should just quench his thirst before he leaves Sugar Camp by sipping from the abundant cups of common sense they fill over there.
It's a lot sweeter brew.
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