Stop the drama – lead by example

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Amy Mayhew

It’s hard to believe that The Holly Express has been on track delivering daily news to the residents of the greater Holly community for over two years now.  Yeah, it’s a lot of work. But I’ve said it all along – if I didn’t love what I do, I wouldn’t do it.

And up until the last six months or so, I have loved it. No, I’m not closing up shop or throwing in the towel on this whole endeavor. I just need to get a little something off my chest – that’s all.

Has anyone else noticed that the level of gossip, false accusations, and rumors in the village of Holly have completely gone off the charts? Well, having covered the news and happenings in Holly with various news publications for nearly a decade, I have never seen anything like it before, and to be honest, it’s really bringing me down.

On Tuesday, I attended the Village Council meeting. Listed under the agenda’s “Old Business” heading was “police services.”

I have to admit – my interest was piqued, and having heard no pre-discussion or background on the agenda items from the village manager, I was cautiously optimistic – maybe something good was happening with the police department, or better yet, maybe some of the council members would revisit the concept of shared services.

But as soon as Village Manager Jerry Walker began to explain why a member of council asked that the item be added to the agenda, my hopeful expectations went flying out the window.

Mr. Walker referenced the Oct. 11 meeting in which a council member shared a phone call she had received from a concerned Holly citizen regarding a rumor that the resident had heard about the village’s police department possibly being outsourced to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department.  

After the meeting, the council member who shared the information was allegedly forced into naming names. And that she did, so that Mr. Walker could revisit the topic during the Oct. 25 council meeting, per the village president’s directive.

Listening to Tuesday night’s discussion of “police services” turned out to be a lot like listening to a game of “telephone.”  Remember the game? It’s the one where one person whispers a fact to another person, who then passes it on to another, and another, and by the end of the game, you often have a completely different fact or phrase than what started the whole mess.

Walker’s explanation went something like this:  “Originally Mr. X received a phone call in which an anonymous person told him that the village council was looking to do away with or change police services from the village police department to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “He then called Mrs. Y knowing that she is a business owner in the village and thought that perhaps she might have some information. She, in turn called Mr. Z who in turn then called (the council member) just to get some clarification on it.”

Really?

No action was taken. It all just proved to be a colossal waste of time for everyone.

On my way out of the meeting, resident Larry Lilly stopped me, asking why I hadn’t attended the Ethics Committee meeting earlier that evening. I told him that normally I don’t attend committee meetings, and that since I hadn’t heard that anything newsworthy was being discussed, I didn’t go.

Mr. Lilly proceeded to tell me that The Holly Express and I had been a large part of the discussion during that meeting, and that it was really a shame I hadn’t been there to “defend myself.”

While I had no reason to doubt Mr. Lilly’s claim, the reporter in me wanted to hear it for myself, and so I obtained a copy of the tape of that very meeting from Clerk/Treasurer Cathrene Behrens.

Tasked with developing a “Code of Ethics” for the village of Holly, the committee wasn’t discussing that particular topic – at least it didn’t sound like it to me. Instead, Village President Jeff Miller was asking Mr. Walker whether the village attorney had provided any insight on how a governing body could somehow suspend or remove a person from a given committee or a council.

“I know I have the right to come back and say, look, when I became village president, this is the way I mapped out all of these committees of three – and it’s by numbers of unanimous vote,” Mr. Miller said. “Now I’ll pick on Tom Clark because he’s not here – if maybe he’s on a committee and he’s really being disagreeable - there is something really out of whack, and maybe I can call to him and say, ‘You’ve got to get along. You can agree to disagree,’ but if it was very disagreeable, I could come in and say we need to remove him from this.”

When neither fellow Ethics Committee member Jason Hughes nor Jackie Campbell bought into Mr. Miller’s philosophy, the topic shifted to the village office alarm system, how The Holly Express broke the story, and my discussion with Mr. Miller as I gathered information in writing the story.

Apparently, Mr. Miller chose to pick on me because, like Mr. Clark, I wasn’t there, either.

“I got chewed out last week because I supposedly broke the story about us not having an alarm system,” Mr. Miller told his fellow committee members.

“You did?” Ms. Campbell exclaimed.

“No, I didn’t but one of the ladies (in the village offices) thought I did,” he said. When asked if he had “leaked the story,” he said, “No, I was pulling into Tom’s Coney to have breakfast with two of my foster guys, and they had the goods.”

“The goods,” referred to by Mr. Miller, was the fact that I had learned that the Holly’s village offices didn’t have an alarm system and hadn’t for nearly three decades. In addition to that, the vault wasn’t working, either.

“I was blindsided,” Mr. Miller said in the ethics meeting. “Now along the way one of the rumors is that a certain department head,  and the reporter said, and perhaps some of these rumors are coming out of the police department, I don’t know – that a department head talked to three of our council members about, you know, complaining about things.”

Our telephone conversation that day never once deviated from the alarm and vault issue, so I’m not sure what Mr. Miller’s motive was in passing the “rumor buck” onto me. Honestly, I still have absolutely no idea what he was talking about in the meeting.

If our community leaders want the gossiping to stop, it has to start with them and after listening to the ethics tape, and sitting through 10 minutes of he said/she said in the village chambers Tuesday night, it’s extremely apparent that right now, that isn’t happening.

The way I see it, the rumors, gossip and innuendo are counterproductive to any efforts we may ever hope to make as a community.

Have a great week.