Northfield Township Manager Candidates interviewed

Five potential Township Managers were interviewed over the course of two evenings. The individual interviews can be watched using our LiveAgendas, below. Later today we will produce a matrix allowing you to compare each candidate's answers to the Township Labor Attorney's set of ten questions. After the interviews the Board discussed and approved the purchase of the last two unpurchased Barker Road non motorized path easements at the extortionary price of $20,000 apiece. Andy Lakatos, a Township citizen, approached the Township with an offer to pay the $6500.00 separating the Township's offer from the Landowner's demanded price. The Board voted 4:3 to accept his offer. Lakatos did not actually have the cash. He wanted to give the Township a post dated check. The Treasurer refused that offer. He said he would go door to door to raise the cash among the homes on the west side of US-23. He said that if he could not raise the money from his neighbors that he would pull the money from his retirement account. Trustee Otto advised him to take credit card payments. What he or someone actually did was start a GoFundMe. As of 5 PM, May 23, $951 has been raised. Scroll to the bottom of this page to find the GoFundMe Donor Link.

Trustee Dockett pointed out, repeatedly, that $6500 was not the true cost. Due to the previous Board's promise, the $20,000 paid for each of the last two easements was now the adjusted price of the easements previously transferred to the Township. The two property owners neighboring these last two, and perhaps more, are now owed the difference between $20,000 and the lower prices they were paid. Dockett also pointed out that even that wasn't the true cost, since hundreds of thousands of dollars will now be exiting the Township coffers to replace functioning sidewalk with a more loftily named but identically purposed non motorized path.

Township Treasurer Zelenock said that this should be a lesson. In future a sidewalk could be funded piecemeal, on a pay as you can afford basis, and save enormous amounts of taxpayer money. For example, the recently completed sidewalk extension linking downtown to the Whitmore Lake Tavern area cost only $30,000.

By contrast, the bizarrely financed short stretch of sidewalk by the old high school, the supposedly safety improving sidewalk that forces pedestrians to cross busy Whitmore Lake Road twice in the space of four or five hundred feet, cost about $170,000. As Wayne Dockett so often advised the now fled Township Manager, that is double the manager's original promise.

The meeting closed with Trustees Otto and Chick sneering off the requests of residents that the voters be listened to and that lessons be learned from the previous Board's idiosyncratic supervision of the now fled former manager. Chick closed with the fantastic claim that we should all just move forward, that past behavior and decisions should tell us nothing about the character of the Trustees or the quality of their decision making.

But that's a subject for our next Editorial.

Candidates and their resumes, applications, etc, in order of their interviews