It is the public that needs protection

During last Thursday’s commissioner meeting, when given the opportunity to discuss the uncounted votes in our general election, I became concerned about the way the public was treated, and that feeling didn’t get any better after the canvassing board meeting the following day. It seemed evident to me that far too many public officials feel the public is somehow less important to our system of self-government than the public officials themselves.

At the beginning of the first public comment section, the chair of the commission felt that we needed to be told that we needed to be civil and respectful to the elected officials — but the same request wasn’t made of the elected officials.

Stan Jasinski pointed out, appropriately, that the part of the meeting we were in was specifically “public comment” time, but I didn’t feel it was respected as “our” time.

When I approached to make my comment, I asked questions because I was continuing to seek information and explanation on a subject the public was justifiably concerned over. I don’t understand why we weren’t allowed to ask clarifying questions of the county clerk during this time when the public is allowed to interact with their elected officials — especially considering the fact that explanations and clarification were certainly warranted given the seriousness of the situation.

The rule barring questions from public comment time doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose, especially when you consider that there are times when things happen so rapidly that the public has to ask questions to make sense of the situation.

In this case, given the lack of information that was being provided to the public by the county clerk, questions needed to be asked to expect any level of public confidence in our election system.

The idea that the public’s comments need to be civil and without passion is also unreasonable, given the anger demonstrated by Commissioner Wagoner right before the second public comment section of the meeting, and the rude and dismissive manner in which Clerk Hadlock has spoken to so many members of the public throughout this
experience. She even got up and stormed out of the room at one point, and from my perspective, the behavior of the public in these exchanges was modeled for them by public officials.

The anger of Wagoner and Hadlock was in reference to a request by our publisher, Bob Bonnar, to call into the meeting to respond to accusations of slander and unprofessional behavior on the part of newspaper employees. As is so often the case, the livestream link that Clerk Hadlock provides to allow people to participate in county commission meetings remotely did not work, but our elected officials chose again to cut off communication for the purpose of “protecting” a fellow elected official.

Over the course of those two days of meetings, as a matter of fact, I saw very little effort on the part of our public officials to protect members of the public from slander and unprofessional attacks, and they were certainly handed out repeatedly — from Hadlock’s accusations against the newspaper and the candidate whose votes she lost to Commissioner Wagoner’s suggestion that the public owes Hadlock an apology to the hostile manner in which a member of the canvassing board consistently addressed members of the public during Friday’s meeting.

Instead of responding promptly and humbly to questions and reasonable requests, public officials have pointed fingers and assigned blame everywhere but where it so obviously should lie. Instead of leading the line of questioning and being first in line to demand accountability in our election, they were concerned about setting precedents that would allow the public easier access to government meetings.

I can’t tell you how strange it still feels to watch the videos of these meetings and prepare them for publication on our Youtube channel. Given the posture and behavior of most of the Weston County officials who have participated in this ordeal, you would think that somebody had been falsely accused of miscounting ballots.

But there was nothing false about this accusation. The only falsehoods were provided by a government official who insisted first that the election was accurate, and then claimed that only one race had been affected by the error, and then insulted members of the public who tried to determine how such a terrible mistake could be made, and finally defended herself by suggesting that she had the right to privacy when discussing missing votes in a general election with a newspaper reporter.

I can tell you now that such a conversation will never take place off-the-record, and I don’t know if I can ever have an off-the-record conversation with some of these elected officials again given the lack of faith I suddenly have in the way county government works.

What happened in the Weston County Courthouse last week presented a clear display of the very reasons that a populist movement has swept through our country. I certainly felt like the ruling class was treating the so-called common peasants as lesser individuals — and many have clearly forgotten that they are not the bosses in this dynamic.

The people put you in office because our republic is run by the people, not the ruling class, and I really hope that the folks who
consider themselves to be part of that ruling class will watch themselves in our video.

Maybe they’ll see what we see.