July 11 Board Meeting

[Opinion-JGN]

The low point of the meeting could have been Jacki Otto's sneering dismissal of the interest Township Employees expressed in their salaries.  

But she topped that.  The low point was Otto's bid to save five hundred big bucks by making Northfield Township's dog park the only dog park in North America - and possibly on earth - the only dog park without a trash can for dog waste.  She claimed that she always carries her dog waste home with her, and sometimes the dog waste left by other dogs.  

The high point of the meeting was the first public appearance of Northfield Township's new Controller, Yvette Patrick.  This skilled and highly qualified individual came highly recommended.  Her hiring marks a sea change in the complexion of Northfield Township's hiring practices.  You can thank Supervisor Marlene Chockley and Treasurer Lenore Zelenock for that.  

It was only last year that Manager Howard Fink refused to remove racist dog whistle literature from the Township Offices.  It was only last year that the Township Board was informed of the presence of this hate speech and that this hate speech was being distributed in the lobby of the Township Offices.  The Board, including Jacki Otto and Janet Chick, apparently saw nothing wrong with racist hate speech when oh-so-cleverly encoded in the form of dog whistle rhetoric.  [Hate in High Resolution: 900kb] Or at minimum, lacked the courage to say anything.  So they did nothing.  The offensive literature remained available, in public view, as the public face of Northfield Township.  Even today, Trustee Jacki Otto lauds the hate speech writer's "great work" on the ZBA.

 

Yvette Patrick seated pic8 800w488h

The documents below are those contained in the meeting packet.  As anyone who has ever watched Trustee Dockett struggle to find documents during a meeting knows, the packet is unindexed and impossible to navigate.  So we have pulled out the individual documents and converted them into text, searchable, copyable, cut'n'pastable text and spreadsheets.  

 

What's hidden in this huge stash of documents?  

  • The Budget amendment which codifies the ugliness of the 4:3 Board Split and the venality of Jacki Otto's personal Agenda.  
  • As the result of the public Board vote to place Northfield Police Lt Greene on unpaid leave following June 27th closed door deliberations, the Township will very probably spend $10,000 - $50,000 defending itself against a lawsuit.  (The beginnings of that process, a grievance, are mentioned in the Public Safety Report)

Watch individual Agenda items, jump straight to them using our LiveAgendas:

Watch this meeting the old fashioned way, beginning to end, with multiple camera points of view, on VideoNorthfield:

Meeting Documents - extracted from the packet, rotated upright as needed and turned into searchable text