Friday, October 23, 2009

Candidates for Iron River City Councilman

Fair use doctrine has us incorporating an
"IronCountyIndependent" posting as newsworthy
though one doubts the validity of anything
coming from an anonymously concealed member
of that group.

===================================================
From: shadow_man4243
Subject: [ironcountyindependent] UPCOMING ELECTIONS
To: ironcountyindependent@yahoogroups.com
Date: Friday, October 23, 2009, 7:41 AM

Scuttlebutt has it that Iron County Doings cub
reporter Ben Smith is running as a write in for
Iron River City Council from the 3rd district.
He is hoping to get more votes than Tom King
who the only one who filed for the position.
HHHMMM one can only wonder why Ben decided
to run on slips rather than file?

shadow
=====================================================

Who can say for sure what is in any other human
being's head? I don't know if Ben is running in
order to keep the election honest, or because
he is doing this on a lark. The reason doesn't
matter. Rather what matters is that this way,
Tom King isn't elected with a single vote, his
own.

Two matters of concern surface immediately.

There is the matter of conflict of interest. The
URL above is a discussion about conflicts
regarding a position on a school board and
being some other public official in the state
of Michigan. It is not significantly different
from the situation we're discussing.

Tom King is the Iron County dogcatcher. I would
be among the first to challenge Tom's status
as a city councilman. If Iron River actually
seated him, I would be among the first to give
a clear demonstration of the conflict of the
positions during a City Council public meeting.

And how is Mr. King going to find the time
during his busy schedule as dogcatcher to attend
the city council meetings? Is the Iron County
Sheriff's Department going to cover his position
during the times that King is in sessions, and
perhaps on downstate or out-of-state missions
for the City Council? Who is going to pay for
the Sheriff's department covering for King
during such periods?

Please see http://tinyurl.com/ykvjsh4

The second concern is of electing an individual
who is, in fact, homeless. Tom King lives in a
house that is provided for him by his mother. He
has no home of his own. Is the city of Iron River
going to follow the Iron River Township example
of having a homeless elected official making
decisions on behalf of an electorate when the
candidate himself is obviously incapable of
maintaining his own person and home well enough
to provide for himself?

The only legitimate means Tom King has to refute
the financial claim is to provide a financial
statement showing how he looks after himself.

Also consider this. This county has elected
Rosalie King to the County Board of Commissioners.
She has not been elected to the Iron River City
Council. If Tom King were his own man and weren't
dependent on his Mommy, there would be no question
that he might vote his conscience rather than
what ever way Mommy told him to vote.

I disagree with Ben Smith about a lot of things.
I'm conservative and Ben is a mostly liberal
Democrat though sometimes he surprises me. The
main thing you'd find about Ben on Iron River
City Council is that he would vote legitimately,
keeping faith with those who elected him, even
if that went against his personal ideologies.

Bill Vajk

1 comment:

Bill Vajk said...

I sent the message to Tom King and it bounced. Just because some system administrator or another thinks something might be a virus, when it isn't, doesn't mean I will jump to and send the clean message by some other means in order to placate the paranoid.

Best of luck to everyone using the county web address to receive email.

Pertinent part of bounced email follows.

===================================
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

tking@iron.org
This message has been rejected because it has
a potentially executable attachment "[Iron County Doings] Candidates for Iron River City Councilman.eml"
This form of attachment has been used by
recent viruses or other malware.
If you meant to send this file then please
package it up as a zip file and resend it.

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