Machine Politics Runs Iron County, Michigan

I spent about three decades living in the suburban
Chicago region. In the beginning I was thoroughly
astonished that in 1974 no one could buy fresh
meat at the local supermarket in the evening. The
meat cutters union had a rule that no meat cutter
worked past 5PM on weekdays, and they didn’t
work on the weekends either. The union contracts
required a union member to be on duty at the store
where fresh meat was sold in order to service the
customers. So if you worked a normal workweek,
you could never buy fresh meat in Chicago or the
collar counties surrounding that city.

The mayor of Chicago was a fellow named Richard
J. Daley, father of the mayor who more recently
retired in order to make room for Rahm Emanuel,
a machine politics guru who jumped out of his high
ranking White House job into the top political
(machine) job in Illinois, his home state, that being
the mayor of Chicago.

The elder Daley, late in his life and late in his multi-
decade career as mayor of Chicago, had a meeting
with the union heads, and quite suddenly the union
rules changed with fresh meat available in the
supermarkets just like the rest of the United States.
Wherever it exists, machine politics reaches, and
controls, every aspect of life! What legitimate
interest did the City of Chicago have in private
business dealings between the union and the regional
supermarkets? Sorry, that’s another of my rhetorical
questions, the answer being “none.” But it didn’t matter,
because Daley thus ingratiated himself to the public at
large. And that love of the man wasn’t limited to the
city alone, it affected everyone in the collar counties,
the bulk of the population of the entire state. Of course
restrictions on the sale of fresh meat should never have
been imposed in the first place, but that’s another story
in itself.

It was the same elder Daley who, without reservation,
told the press “I’m wearing mistletoe on my coattails”
when pressed for some information Daley was not
willing to give up. And surprisingly, to someone only
recently arrived to the region at the time, that resolved
the issue, effectively shutting down any possibility of
getting any answer at all to the question originally
asked.

Having lived in an overtly machine politics region,
that is a place where the machinations of machine
politics weren’t concealed, it became obvious, soon
after I moved here, that the same sort of control
system is at play in Iron County. The first signal I
saw that “the fix was in” happened at an Iron River
DDA meeting when Hovey company was in contention
for being named as the developer of the Central School.

The DDA chairman, Gibula, threw the discussion open
to decide among potential candidates. From the floor
came information that other experiences with had been
favorable. Without further discussion Gibula moved that
Hovey be accepted as the developer of the property, a
vote was rushed through, and the deal was done. But
Hovey’s trip to that Iron River meeting was partly
enabled by the dispatch of Julie Melchiori, then
EDC developer, to Kingsford airport, the facility to
which Hovey had flown his own aircraft from downstate.

Naturally none of the other contenders, if there even were
any, received such favorable attention.

It came as no surprise that Julie took the occasion to
promote a new Iron County airport, a facility that the
public had voted down with its feet, somewhat earlier.
Julie said the county airports were too small for a plane
like the one Hovey flies to land. Thus it has become clear
that a new Iron County Airport is part of the agenda that
the Iron County political machine is promoting on behalf
of one of the machine’s members, and that Julie Melchiori
is, in your humble correspondent’s opinion, one of the Iron
County political machine’s most willing operatives.

Once disclosed, the breadth of the operations of the Iron
County Political Machine becomes somewhat transparent,
with tendrils reaching everywhere. The problem is, of
course, that some good emanates. But the real problem is
that private initiatives, meaning resulting in private benefit
with no significant impact to the good of the general
population, is the strength of all machine politics. And
that’s always done at public expense.

Saving the “Middle School” to be put to “public use” was
one such project. Having personally toured the building, I
see nothing there worthy of continuing to maintain at
public expense. The building should have been torn down
when it became surplus to the needs of the school district. 
It isn’t as though we don’t already have plenty of viable
vacant commercial property in Iron County. So privately
owned commercial property remains vacant while the Middle
School is operated at a loss by a consortium of local
municipal governments at public expense, leading to a
further decline of commercial property in Iron County
because of private interests by the local political machine.
Please see our earlier article about parking regulations in
Iron River destroying the commercial viability of the upper
floors in Iron River’s commercial buildings.

That’s precisely the problem with machine politics. It
doesn’t allow for the political and economic freedoms that
our form of government promises, placing the political
machine’s interests ahead of public need. And it is far
worse when the machine operates in secret where the
general public cannot seem to get a handle on it. That’s
the case here in Iron County.

What we are now witnessing is the re-emergence of
stronger political operatives into the current election cycle
because partial control, at the county level, has been lost.
One machine candidate as announced that “I don’t care for
the direction the county is headed in.” Of course not. Tom
King got fired from his cushy dogcatcher job. Operative
Julie Melchiori has been more or less forced to seek
legitimate employment, although there is some doubt at
to her entrepreneurial skills. And there’s probably no
end to the political machine toes that have been stomped
upon by the reform government that managed to wrest
control at the county level. “Not ready from prime time”
Faccin was also forced out, but is now, once again, in
contention for an elective position.

Patronage hiring by government is always necessary to
maintain control by machine politics, and in counties such
as this, people sell out remarkably cheaply. But of course
taxes fund all our government functions rather thinly in the
first place, so rather than to hire a Tom King whose
functioning as a county employee is severely limited, it is
far better from the public’s perspective to spend just a little
bit more to hire and retain a fully qualified sheriff’s deputy
who is qualified to do more good when the chips are down.
But Tom is the son of a county board member who is also a
machine politics operative.

You may have noticed that I didn’t name, or locate, the
background organization that’s running Iron County through
a political machine. I’ve done this to entice the reader to think
about this problem, and to figure it out for themselves. On
that journey you may discover things I cannot put into print,
and we’ll all be ahead for your thought and concern. But
please think about the problems, and decide whether you’re
in favor of enriching the members of the political machine
at public expense whenever you’re in a voting booth this
year.

Bill Vajk