This by former OP trustee Barbara S. Ebner appeared recently in both local papers.  It is a good response to new leadership ideas in the Village board:

Please allow me to affirm that I am a true believer in the Council Manager form of government. It has stood us in good stead for 50 years and has moved Oak Park far ahead of its neighbors who retain the use of the aldermanic form. It has allowed us to become the diverse, welcoming, prize-winning village we are, while our neighbors to the south suffer from scandals, intrigue and party politics.

In that regard, several disturbing recommendations were made at the village board’s study session last Monday night. They were made by new trustees, and I would like to believe they were made from innocence, not as an attempt to change the government form. To my knowledge, we have had no referendum on changing our form of government. You were elected to serve under this form.

I will only address two of the issues that I see as challenging governance under our current Village Manager form. There are others, and I hope they will also be addressed.

First, a recommendation was made to discuss the forming of a Personnel Commission, although no specifics were given. Since commissions are formed to make recommendations to the board, such a commission has no function. One of the basic tenets of the Council Manager form of government specifically places all hiring and firing of staff in the hands of the professional manager. The single employee of the board, the Village Manager, is the only person such a commission would be responsible for. Unless, the board was to require a search for a new Village Manager, such a commission would have no tasks.

Second, a recommendation to give responsibility for a specific geographic area to each member of the board was made. Although the Council Manager form of government allows for such divisions, there is no place for such a system in Oak Park. We are a tiny, land-locked community. We have made diversity our single most important goal. Our geography is probably our least diverse aspect.

Trustees are elected to serve all of Oak Park. Their major function is to set policy, and approve a budget which reflects these policy decisions. Directing individual activities to a specific geographic area of the village can only mean making these individuals spokespersons for individual areas. In other places they call them aldermen.

It immediately puts trustees at odds with one another. Arguments over how many pot holes were tilled, streets repaved, etc. in a given area would only be the beginning. This is not the goal of our form of government. It can only make meetings longer, make it necessary to have more meetings and provide more acrimony, not less. This is exactly the situation that takes away time and energy from your ability to govern under the Council Manager form of government.

Allow me to quote from a document from the international Council Manager’s Association (ICMA org for those interested). “The council is the legislative body; its members are the community’s decision makers. Power is centralized in the elected council, which approves the budget and determines the tax rate, for example. The council also focuses on the community’s goals, major projects, and such long-term considerations as community growth, land use development, capital improvement plans, capital financing and strategic planning. The council hires a professional manager to carry out the administrative responsibilities and supervises the manager’s performance.”

First, do your job! Then allow the Village Manager to do his.

“They do not have a commission to solve society’s problems, as they see them, but simply to decide cases before them according to the rule of law,” [Supreme Court nominee Roberts] wrote to the [senate judiciary] committee, which will begin considering Roberts’ nomination on Sept. 6.

Say wha’?  The men and women in black don’t come with answers?  Subversive!

See Wednesday Journal for my column on New leadership village board commentary. 

 Journalists of many sorts fly through here for short times, and there are a handful of semi-permanent reporters from a few majors such as CNN and Time. Some of these are good and serious folks, but I think they are hobbled by working for agencies and are not free to roam and follow their instincts. Being completely independent allows freedom to roam the battle field from North to South, from Iran to Syria, and to describe without filters what I see.

This from Michael Yon, whose free-lancing in Iraq at least one newsman considered “ballsy” when I told him about him.  The same newsman gave a wholly credible hair-raising account of dangers there, including being kidnapped by a Baghdad gang for selling to an imam who will get money for him from his people or have him executed on TV.  They are all ballsy, for that matter: this is not calling in a tollway accident or press conference revelation, for which we thank reporters.  It’s putting yourself on the line every day.

Meanwhile, “Michael Yon : Online Magazine” has good stuff.  The latest, dated Friday, is an Ernie Pyle-like account of non-citizen GI’s, “Welcome Aboard,” out of Mosul, with this:

I was privileged to witness the award ceremony for 12 new American citizens in Deuce Four [24th something] recently. I hope America makes them feel welcome. If the folks at home could see what these people are doing in Iraq, they would make these special troops feel as honored guests. But now, better yet, they are honored citizens, giving life to the concept of active citizenship.

One of them, Victor Quinonez, has earned a “great combat reputation.”

 “Mike,” he told Yon, “when the shit goes down and the bullets are flying, you stick with me and I’ll get you out. Never fear when the Q is here! You’ve seen me in action. You know I’ll get you out. I’m a Mexican, not a Mexican’t!”

“Not a Mexican’t.”  That’s good.

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A White Sox item: New third-basemen Geoff Blum, just acquired from Padres, is a switch-hitter but attended U. Cal-Berkeley and hits only to left field.  It’s all they let him do at college.  Sorry.

“Scrutiny on the bounty” is Chi Trib e-version headline (not bad!) for story about firing by (private) employer of Cook County Republican chairman because he offered $10G reward for information leading to indictment of one RM Daley, mayor of our fair city, for violating court order vs. political hiring.

Gary Skoien’s offer Tuesday infuriated Daley and, most importantly, Skoien’s boss, a Democrat and outspoken supporter of the mayor. Skoien was terminated Thursday as an officer of Prime Group Inc., a Chicago-based real estate firm where he has worked since 1990.

“It was sophomoric at best,” said Wash.-based staffer for Rep. Dennis Hastert, our muy (tres, very much) politico House speaker, as firm a supporter of what Chi Trib’s Kass calls the Illinois Repub-Dem ruling combine as you will find.  Look out, U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald, scourge of politicos-at-the-trough, we do not think Dennis H. has your or our best interests at heart when it comes to shaking up the scene.

As for sophomoric, what about RM Daley’s dragging wife and children into the picture in response to the $10G bounty?  Hey, it’s how he learned to get the other guy on the Nativity of Our Lord playground.  Why quit now?

See also Kass in Chi Trib today with pointed, even piquant references to:

 mid-level Daleyites the day after the leak became news, strutting around City Hall on Thursday with their chests puffed out, like bull pigeons in front of a popcorn shop.

and various acute observations, such as:

“Our guys” [11th Ward denizens] means a tribe. It all comes down to tribes in tribal Chicago. Like the tribe that must show it is fighting back to keep its warriors in line, the tribe that takes what it wants, the tribe that runs things now.

 the leak accomplished one thing. It let a few pigeons puff and strut, at least for a day.

Here’s something to crank you up:  Judge Maura Slattery Boyle, who set a bailable amount — $900,000 — for rich-daddy-blessed accused bike-lock murderer Muaz Haffar, who did not show up today in court and may have fled the country, maybe to Turkey, where he has contacts, is brother of Patrick Slattery, indicted City Hall insider in the matter of clout-sodden hiring practices.  She had John Daley’s help in getting elected.  Slatterys are good old Bridgeport family, friends of the Daleys.  Are there any other ways they can produce mischief in the city?

“I did not realize the document was under seal,” defense lawyer Michael Goggin said, excusing himself — with apologies, of course — for leaking names of cooperating witnesses to City Hall. 

Well of course.  The guy is new at this and has been earning his keep processing home purchases, whence comes his very expensive suits as shown in color in noosepapers, out of which suits he is fairly bursting with ruddy good health and beaucoups de avoir du pois. 

“Irate liberals succeeded in getting one prestige paper, the Chicago Tribune, to drop Mallard Fillmore,” reports Harry Stein in City Journal — in “Laughing at the Left,” about conservative comic strips.  Not so in Portland, however, where “liberal complaints moved the Oregonian to run a reader poll deciding the strip’s future [and] respondents voted 4,720 to 3,547 to keep it.”

Go Portland!  And go newspaper that asks people what they want!  Meanwhile, in Beantown, the Globe’s ombudsperson suggested the less acerbic Prickly City replace Mallard, which is what Chi Trib did, only to douse the strip in which Prickly “derided Senator Ted Kennedy’s moral high-handedness at Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearings by making a none-too-subtle Chappaquiddick reference,” which was too much for the Michigan Avenue Puritans.

It’s not easy being a guardian of public propriety.

Retired newsie Bob has this about copy editors:

Your rhetorical question as to whether the Trib has copy editors who walk over to the writer and ask if you had such-and-such in mind put a smile on my face remembering a Sun-Times copy writer who would walk over and start every consultation with the words, “Did you write this piece of shit?”

It always put me in a good mood because he asked every writer that question and you knew it was just unbiased copy desk irreverence for all writers.

But perhaps we live in different times and such a question would wind up before the EEOC.

I would say so.  You have to watch what you say these days.

It should be noted that Sun-Times is no better than Chi Trib when it comes to giving email addresses with bylines.  As in today’s stories here and here about Chicago Historical Society getting a new president, a lawyer — in neither story, by the way, is the new man so designated until the end, leaving some of us to wonder if the new “leader” is president or chairman.  Trib gives William Mullen address, wmullen@tribune.com — at end of story, vs. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel standard, putting it right under byline, thus to encourage reader response.  No address is given for S-T’s Andrew Hermann.

Both call Jones Day a Chicago law firm, but it’s a Cleveland firm — “The Cleveland megafirm,” Startribune.com called it just yesterday — with a Chicago office since 1987, which is a case of getting something on the fly, I’d say, and not checking it — copy desk anywhere?

Both stories, on the other hand, were of keen interest to this reader, who caught the immediate past president, Lonnie Bunch, in an Oak Park appearance in 2002 and was impressed with his ambivalence about living in Oak Park, apparently for reasons of race, even though he had picked it over Wilmette rather than put his child in an all-white school.  We don’t have all-white schools in Oak Park.  Bunch by his own admission had been well received in Oak Park and was a featured speaker in a centennial program.  He spoke off the cuff and got caught in that ambivalence by a question after his talk from a fellow black.

In any case, Bunch announced in March that he was returning to Washington and the Smithsonian to head up a new Afro-Am museum, this after presiding over severe blows to the midsection of the Chicago society, which during his tenure came up with big deficit, low attendance, and heavy staff cuts.  His parting shot, one might say, was an exhibit all about lynching and other white-on-black atrocities of the last several centuries. 

Might there be a connection here with declining attendance?  Give me the parent eager to take his kiddies to see gruesome pictures of lynchings, and I give you one in a distinct numerical minority.  Bunch is praised in absentia by the society’s chairman as a tough act to follow, for his “ability to reach out” to blacks and hispanics; but that seems to have been a case of treating them monolithically and assuming they aren’t like us white folks.  Blacks and hispanics may not be all so eager to put their kids through the blood-and-thunder aggrieved-minority process as some think.

The new man, Gary T. Johnson, will be handing over day-to-day duties to CHS veteran Russell Lewis, which seems wise.  Johnson has to go out there and raise money.

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On another front, see Margaret Ramirez’ page one Chi Trib virtual takeout on Mormons.  Having roundly criticized her recently, I must say this is a good one, done not on deadline but with time to spare and lots of room — it’s a whopping 2,220 words!  The peg is newly arriving blacks and hispanics among Mormon membership.  That is handled with nice combination of stats and quotes, while a neat summary of Mormonism is also provided.  I love you, Margaret!  All is forgiven!