Sometime early Friday afternoon a helpful neighbor slipped the following document (PDF file) into the front screen door. It’s text is identical to the letter posted over at that other discussion board. It is clearly meant to be a letter from City Councilman, Mike Kearny to Mayor, Rodger Holm.
On my copy – added afterwards, I’m certain – someone has written in Russian at the bottom, Позор! which is pronounced, Pozor! and means, Shame! The other word I’m unsure of because of the handwriting. It looks like, Пазаляю, but that’s not a word. And yes, I had to check the dictionary. It’s been a long, long time since I used my limited Russian.
So my thoughts on Friday were: clearly there is a drama queen out there that got ahold of or made up this document. They knew I knew some Russian and they skulked up to my house in broad daylight and slipped it surreptitiously into my door on Friday quietly enough not to alert the dog or my wife working in the basement. It is clearly meant to be from City Councilman, Mike Kearny to Mayor, Roger Holm.
Due to the nature of the delivery and the style of writing I thought it was a fake. Mike is an intelligent guy. So, when I read in Paragraph 3.
The candidates that we are considering come from communities smaller than clinton by many orders of magnitude …:
That he would know that an order of magnitude is a multiple of 1000. Therefore that a city just one order of mangnitude smaller than Clinton would have a population of about 23. That and other things such as asking questions that he clearly was in a position to know the answers to.
Not that I disagreed with any of the points made in the document. I agree with almost all of it. I just thought it the product of one of our friendly neighborhood conspiracy theorists/agents provacatuers. Until Sunday, when I saw Mike and some other friends and found that a) KROS had already had Mayor Holm on the radio and mentioned this memo in the interview and b) Mike Kearny copped to writing it and said that he had distributed it to a number of people.
Mike said his main concerns, other than those clearly stated in the memo, were several fold. That there was an increasing level of secrecy in City Hall. This lack of openess only gives additional credence to the already pretty widespread impression that much of the City’s business is done by insider deal-making. Kearny also said he was worried that the Mayor is taking on powers and responsibilities that are not strictly speaking his in our form of City governance.
It might be useful to remind people here that under Clinton’s City Charter, the office of Mayor is largely ceremonial; limited to presiding over City Council Meetings, vetoing legislation if (s)he desires – a veto that can be overridden – and other “duties of state” such as representing the city to visitors, etc. Think of the relationship between the Queen of England and the Prime Minister as a useful analogy with the Mayor being the well, King and the City Manager being the Prime Minister. City department heads and employees report directly to the City Manager, not to the Mayor nor to Members of the Council.
Councilman Kearny also stated that many members of the council were “too tired,” to be bothered with such nuances, and that they did not have the energy for a fuss or controversy over these matters. That is why he distributed the memo to various community members he thought might have the ear of both the Mayor and of other members of the community.
As I said above, I think all of the questions in the Kearny Memo are important and valid questions to be asked. But in order to have any real impact on events they need to be asked not only by one Member of Council but by members of the public and the press. Repeatedly. Until straight answers are given and proper action taken.
Update, 9/9/09, 8:31 a.m.Yes, I am a moron. An order of magnitude is 10X not 1000X my bad. In my defense, I spend a lot of time explaining to people the differences between kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc which are leaps of 1000X. Thanks to the commenters for the catch.
Hey genius, an order of magnitude is a factor of 10, not 1000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
Not that it matters all that much to your main points – but your definition of what an order of magnitude difference is, is at odds with the generally accepted usage. The common definition of “an order of magnitude difference” is that there is a 10x difference. 1 vs 10 is an order of magnitude difference, for example. Two orders of magnitude would be 1 vs 100. And three orders of magnitude would be 1 vs 1000.
I do find it strange that someone feels it necessary to slither around and drop off anonymous letters (complete with cryptic Russian annotation to further boost the crazy quotient.) A possible sign of paranoid behavior?
Point taken in re orders of mag.
DiscGolfer, have you been to the course at Eagle Point Park?