Corruption in City Government

It has been six weeks since my last post on the political goings-on in Bethel, and in that interval the situation has continued to deteriorate. We have reached a point where the actions of the Mayor and selected council members can only be characterized as corrupt.

Until now I have not referred to the council members by their actual names, but have used labels for them. Several commenters have named them (and, on occasion, labeled them far more spearingly than I), and from this point on I will simply refer to them by name. I will also identify some of the labels.

The Mayor is Eric Middlebrook. He is the leader of the Block of Four and has been called Clipped Gerbil in an earlier comment, and Mayor Mugabe in a more recent one.

The Vice Mayor is Raymond “Thor” Williams. A member of the Block of Four, he was the maker of the motion to terminate the City Attorney. Referred to by a commenter as McCheese. Noted by another commenter always to be on the wrong side of every vote, along with Tundy Rodgers. He is an incredibly insecure individual who tries to make himself feel less inadequate by cutting others down (doesn’t work but he has no other strategies). He wastes an inordinate amount of Council’s time splitting hairs over insignificant issues, like making miniscule and unnecessary budget modifications. He thinks this makes him look smart. Uh…no. Raymond is one of the three current Council members who is also a former Mayor; he was a disaster in that position and could not get re-elected to the following year’s Council when he was one of four people running for three open seats. The codeword among the voters was “EBT”—everybody but Thor. He managed to get elected to the current Council with only 216 votes.

Stanley “Tundy” Rodgers, also a former Mayor and member of the Block of Four; referred to by me as the Blustering Bloviator. That’s all he ever does: bluster. He sees himself as the champion of the little man, the watchdog of the Natives’ interests. He is the Council member with the most seniority, having sat on Council for something like seventeen years, and in all that time he has done absolutely nothing positive for Bethel or its citizens that I have been able to discover, and I have been asking long-time residents. He is quick to trash other people’s ideas and suggestions, but he offers nothing positive himself. He just votes against everything; that way if something doesn’t work out later he can say “see? I was against it all along.” He is incapable of understanding or contributing to the city’s budget approval process; he simply does not show up to those (mandatory) meetings, or leaves early if he does show—yelling as he walks out “doesn’t matter what you decide, I’m going to vote against it anyhow!” It is totally unclear to me why the voters of Bethel have continued to reelect him so many times, but it has to stop. He has to go. He is up for reelection in October; perhaps we’ll be lucky and he simply won’t run again, but I doubt it. He has no other source of ego gratification.

Willie Keppel, the Newly Appointed Council Member. He ran for Council last fall but was defeated by Raymond Williams by 2 votes. When a now-departed Council member moved away from Bethel in January, he applied for appointment to the position along with several others, and when the vote was evenly split, received the appointment by literally drawing the right straw. He is only there for the remainder of the departed member’s term, and must run for election in October. He is the final member of the Group of Four, and along with Tundy, he simply must not be reelected.

Keppel is the Council member referred to by commenter Two Dogs as Torch, because he is widely believed to have set fire to a wooden building owned by his arch-rival Harry Faulkner, the citizen who brought the injunction against him for Conflict of Interest in participating in the termination of the City Attorney. Keppel not only voted for her termination, he seconded the motion to terminate when it was made by Raymond Williams. (No update on that injunction; it hasn’t gone away, but nothing has happened as a result of it that I know of.)

Keppel is the Council member who is and long has been in violation of the Bethel Municipal Code (BMC), and who faces $18,000 in fines for that violation. His case was being prosecuted by the City Attorney; he believed that by firing her the case would magically go away. The Conflict of Interest in this situation is neither subtle nor complicated.

And his violation is particularly disgusting. All Bethel residents are required by the BMC to have their homes signed up for sewer evacuation service, either hauled or piped, at a minimal cost of about $30 per month. For years Keppel refused to sign up; he crapped in a bucket and was seen dumping it in the tundra pond behind his house, which is right in the middle of town. The city even gave him a sewer tank for free AND delivered it to his house. All he had to do was hook it up, but no. It has sat there, a lovely eyesore, for several years now.

The BMC was created by the City Council, and during the swearing-in ceremony of each new Council member, he or she is sworn to uphold and abide by the Code. There is no gray area here; Keppel’s violation is clear-cut, obvious, provable. His hearing in court is on Monday, April 28^th. In the absence of a City Attorney, the City Manager will present the city’s case.

And here is one place where we reach a level of misbehavior that can be called corruption in this City Council. At the regular meeting of the Council which Dutch and I missed while we were in the Arctic, the Mayor actually pressured the City Manager to just dismiss Keppel’s case. Middlebrook actually seemed to think that the City Manager could be coerced into just telling the judge that the city didn’t want to prosecute after all, and it would all go away. In his view, apparently, Council members are exempt from the Code they are sworn to uphold, rather than having the responsibility to lead by example.

The second, and far more significant, situation vying for the label of corruption involves the recall petitions, which I have mentioned before. After the debacle of the firing of the City Attorney, a grass-roots movement of citizens came forward wanting Middlebrook and Williams recalled. Rodgers and Keppel were not eligible for recall, or they would have been included as well. One woman, Diane Moffitt, took the lead in asking people to sign up as petition circulators to gather the necessary 285 signatures of registered voters to place the recall question before the citizens of Bethel.

There were 12 of us who signed up to be petition circulators. We had sixty days to get the signatures, and then the petitions must be turned in to the City Clerk to have the signatures verified as registered voters.

Middlebrook and Williams have acted as if this recall movement were nothing but a joke, and have been openly scornful of it. Middlebrook instructed the City Clerk to be sure the petitions were handled according to the precise letter of the law.

When we had over 300 signatures, Diane asked the City Clerk how the 12 of us go about turning in our petitions. The Clerk said for each of us to bring them in to her office at our convenience. After about half of the petitions had been turned in, the Clerk announced that the petition had failed due to insufficient signatures; only the petitions turned in together counted, the remaining five or six would not be accepted. The Clerk refused to return them to the individuals who had submitted them to her, so that we could turn them all in at once, saying it was “against the law”; but she could not quote what law it was against. We have a week yet before the deadline of May 2^nd.

The Clerk is now denying her initial instructions on how to turn the petitions in. She is saying that she never told us to bring them in to her office at our convenience. She is refusing to do the right thing, which is to return the petitions that were submitted so that we can all turn them in together as a single instrument. Several of the circulators consulted an attorney who said there is absolutely no reason she cannot return those petitions. It was he who said that this is nothing but corruption.

Those same circulators have now contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, who feels that this is pure suppression of the voice of the people. The ACLU is writing a letter to the Clerk, telling her basically to do the right thing: give back the submitted petitions and allow all of them to be turned in together. If she refuses, litigation will follow.

So once again, Bethel’s scarce resources can be squandered by the Council to cover their heinous and illegal behaviors. The Group of Four is leading Bethel down a road which will end in bankruptcy for the city. Those of us trying to apply the brakes may not be enough.

A new comment was posted by Anonymous this past Monday evening to the last blog post I did on the City Council. It speaks to these issues, and is now likely to go completely unseen, being so deeply buried, so I have copied it here.

This evening on the news I heard Mayor Eric "Mugabe" Middlebrook at a council meeting last week pressuring the city manager to release Councilman Willie Keppel from his civil penalties by instructing the judge to dismiss the case. This was after Keppel failed to observe city ordinances and hook up to the city sewer system. Instead he dumped his sewage in the tundra. The kind of example that could lead us all to cholera. He ignored citations served him by the city that have been well documented. Mayor "Mugabe" as we have come to know him, also instructed the City Clerk to throw out citizen petitions to recall him and another city council representative. These council members swore to uphold the laws of this City and by extension the laws of our state and nation. They are so deep into this mess that they lost whatever ethical perspective they might have once possessed.

I agree completely.

For those of you who might be new to this thread—and who have enough interest to read more—I have written four posts in the last two months on the outrageousness of Bethel’s current City Council:

Political Shenanigans, February 13

More Bethel Politics, March 2

City Council Doesn’t Get It, March 15

More on City Council—An Inside Perspective, March 17

And for those of you don’t live in Southwest Alaska and could care less about our local political woes, I beg your indulgence with this diversion. It is having a huge effect in our lives, and if this venue I have created can reach a few people who need to hear of this and might not by other means, then I will use it for that purpose.