Opinion by Matt Marquardt –
The clown show was on full display Tuesday night as things got a little heated at an odder-than-usual Mason City council meeting.
It was revealed that the bottomless pit known as the Blue Zones are the true pet project of Mayor Eric Bookmeyer – the jobless man-mom who spends most of his days wheeling and dealing about town cutting deals on bar napkins. It was further revealed that his $38 dollar an hour sidekick Angela Determan is the heart and soul of his Blue Zone – and he wanted her paid, since she helped him fund raise for it. She was contracted to work only so many hours – $53,000 worth – but she kept on going, then turned in another bill for over $21,800. Things went the mayor’s way, but not before he got egg on his face.
See, the mayor doesn’t like to be questioned. He doesn’t like to be scrutinized. He doesn’t like sunshine sprayed all over his dirty deals. And as evidenced Tuesday, he doesn’t like his yes-men put in positions where they are made to look like the over-paid, long-absent-from-work chair warmers they are.
This leads us to the heart of the mayor’s current predicament: The exposing of his city administrator as more or less either lying to the council or being too inept to track his employee, who seems to have a blank check to cash in hours for pay.
The council didn’t seem to take kindly to Trout’s cover-up. He claims it was all a big mis-understanding, how he failed to report to the council that Determan was working over 500 hundred hours of overtime. Councilman Travis Hickey showed leadership Tuesday night that perhaps he had never displayed before. He vigorously called out Brent Trout for his blatant mismanagement.
“I don’t like how this went down, I don’t like how this came to us,” Mr. Hickey said, as Bookmeyer squirmed in his chair, red-faced, glaring sideways at him. Hickey proposed a smaller payout to Determan, well below the $21,800 she had requested. The council dead-locked at 3-3 and his motion failed. He balked three times on paying Determan fully.
The discussion – and debate – dragged on, and the mayor was miserable as Trout staggered through explanations to questions from the council on why he never cleared Determan’s overtime with them; how, exactly, she would be paid; and why he clearly dropped the ball for so long. It should be mentioned that the council, prior to the Determan-Trout bunglefest, had called our firefighters and EMT’s onto the carpet for burnout and overtime pay (scrutiny) and vowed to investigate them in the near future.
Speaking of calling on the carpet, just what kind of a Mickey Mouse operation is Brent “no-flash-at-all” Trout running in our city hall, anyway? This man seems to have lost it, and I mean lost it big time. After he stumbled and bumbled trying to quell the council’s concerns, but had no luck, he ham-handedly offered a thousand bucks of his own salary to grease the wheels. Pay-offs are just part of this city hall’s routine, you see. Even Bookmeyer questioned whether that is legal or not.
It seems that being the mayor’s coffee boy for all these years has made Mr. Trout a little cuckoo. It’s bad enough he has physically intimidated citizens and imposed goofy rules upon people with cameras, but now apparently his employees are free to do anything they want (some of them attend council meetings, leave, and take to social media to call citizens dirty names.) And again, all in the name of pleasing his true Master, Mayor Eric Bookmeyer. He acts this way because the mayor has him confused and owns his nuts; they are stuffed in a jar somewhere in Eric’s Booze Cave on State Street. Eric so desperately wants the Blue Zone – which roughly 99% of Mason City citizens don’t give a rat’s tootsie roll about – to be a success (resume builder, but no one will hire him). Trout knows this, so to please Eric, he let’s this freelance contracted Blue Zone director Angela Determan run wild and work hundreds of extra hours. She prances and dances all about the Cultural Crescent to her heart’s desire, promoting the Blue Zone that only bored, pretentious, lame people are into. Then, she has the audacity to submit an invoice.
Boom. The council is put in a real bad place. Pay a woman they claim does a great job and at the same time please their mayor. Or, say no on paying her because they have obviously been disrespected and, most importantly, the public won’t like it that this part-timer who already got paid $53,000 gets another $21,800.
As all this was going on, the council tried very hard Tuesday night to say that the dollars used to pay Determan were “grants” and “not tax dollars”. Well guess what, the money got to city hall; it now belongs to the people, and it’s still the council’s job to watch our money. “Their” money became “our” money. Get it? Trout admitted he is set to move grant dollars every which way (intended for other causes) to pay Angela Determan. Peel off a little piece of his $144,000 salary and problem solved, he seemed to think.
Oh, what a mess Brent Trout created in his blind rage to satisfy Eric Bookmeyer. He disrespected the council by not informing them as far back as December when Determan started going over on hours. And on and on she worked; never did she tell anyone of consequence of all her extra-curriculars. Could it be that Trout told her not to worry about getting paid? Could it be that since he knows the mayor leads the council around by the nose, it would be an easy fore-gone conclusion that there would never be a problem with them doling out the people’s money to her? You can be dam sure her real boss – the mayor – knew all about what she was up to.
It’s been said that the mayor filled a power vacuum in city hall when he arrived in 2010. A “strong” leader was absent, everyone was weak and rudderless, so he came in and asserted dominance. For that, you must tip your hat. However, his style of leadership has been nothing but a curse, as proven by his castration of No Flash Trout. And lawsuits. Hostile work environments. Rumors of wrong-doing. Eyewitness accounts of his shenanigans in the bars, at the country club and in the daycare. Stealing stamps. Free trips to Washington. Smear campaigns. Now, he has the man who runs the day-to-day activities of the city bent like a pretzel, behaving like a punch-drunk bar bouncer, concealing information from our city council.
Does Bookmeyer or Trout know the definition of “RESIGN“?
This debate went on for nearly an hour. Janet Solberg offered up a compromise of $20.00 an hour or so for a payout of under $12,000. That proposal was deadlocked at 3-3 and was dead. They even let Determan speak at the podium and take questions. Clearly unprofessional and un-called for lobbying from her.
Travis Hickey made another excellent point when he articulated the fact that if a regular city employee came in on the weekends to perform extra work and then demanded pay, they would never get it. And that’s a full-blown employee of the city, something Determan is not.
But she has something most of our city employees don’t have – that is, being in the mayor’s hip pocket.
Finally, the council voted 4-2 to give Determan that whole $21,803.21. Discuss that on your next walking moai.
