Ottawa Update

September 30, 2024 10:41 AM

When last we visited Ottawa County, Michigan, it was embroiled in a number of lawsuits and controversies ranging from de-funding the local library, to firing of county employees, to various lawsuits. Since then a hotly contested primary in which Ottawa Impact has definitively lost their majority on the council, and other news.

April: Satanic Prayer opens Council meeting following lawsuit.

June: Dueling endorsements by various Republican party groups.


June, August: County members sues his employer MSU and fellow Commissioner over his firing.

August: Primaries in other county positions favored traditional Republicans over OI endorsed candidtes.

Could Democrats gain control of of the County Commission in the deeply red area?

Sept: Staunch Republicans backing a Democratic candidate?

Ottawa Co. commissioners who lost in August primary giving it one last go in November

The Board finally formed a committee to replace the corrupt administrator they fired 7 months ago (made up of OI members)

The county had to pay claims in the original lawsuit involving the county health officer and a different age discrimination lawsuit.

posted by bq (11 comments total)

“God has been sending people to me through door-knocking to say things to me that are supernatural, that are God-breathed,” Atwood said in a recent Facebook live video from the campaign trail.

It still boggles the mind that I have to pretend someone saying this is sane.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:54 AM on September 30 [13 favorites]

It seems that many local communities have decided that handing things over to the extremists has not been good for local governance, nor for getting actual work done and are electing more moderate conservatives who want to focus on governing. But I'm not counting chickens yet on the national scene. There are too many people who, despite what they say to pollsters, will not vote for a woman for president, and will not vote for a black woman for any reason whatsoever. I'm hoping I'm wrong, but there have been very few elections that have shown me otherwise.
posted by drossdragon at 10:55 AM on September 30 [5 favorites]

I had to do a double take at the name Ottawa Impact, wondering how Canadian youth soccer got involved in all this.
posted by saturday_morning at 11:04 AM on September 30 [1 favorite]

GODDAMMNIT (and yay that they are no longer in the majority):

On their first day in office, the Ottawa Impact commissioners had fired the county’s administrator, canned its lawyer of 40 years, closed its diversity office and dumped its motto “Where you Belong” in favor of “Where Freedom Rings.”

...
The new commissioners forced the county’s longtime sex educator, who had developed successful programs to lower teen pregnancy and curb the spread of sexually transmitted infections, into an administrative job. When their efforts to remove the county’s public health director were blocked by the courts, they cut the health department’s budget, eliminating a program that helped feed 22,000 low-income residents each year.

posted by spamandkimchi at 11:28 AM on September 30 [2 favorites]

I had to do a double take

We covered that extensively last time around. Yes, there are many Ottowas, largely named for the people and/or the river. This post is about the county in Michigan.
posted by zamboni at 11:44 AM on September 30

These people need to be taxed a lot harder, frankly. If they have so much money that they can throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at this kind of masturbatory paranoia about the DEI monster coming to tran their children, they have too much money. Buy a boat! Buy a truck! Go to Disney! I don't care, just spend your money on something that isn't "make life worse for others so that I can enjoy the heartwarming glow of feeling persecuted for how wonderful I am".

Deep in my heart I believe that a lot of this stuff comes from how intellectually empty our culture has become - so many people can't read fluently, so many people don't know how to seek out anything intellectually challenging or stimulating (which could be movies! or hobbies! or continuing ed! I'm not saying we all need to sit down with the Lacan). The books and poetry and experiences, including personal experiences of being in nature or making something, that should be bulwarks of our characters are gone, and all the stuff that's trivial, counterproductive or just the sometimes-foods of the brain has to take its place. People don't have access to profound and intense intellectual/emotional experiences that come from reading or engaging with art or being in nature or even a personal spirituality, so they are just suckers for this sort of self-indulgent emotional bullshit, the thinking/feeling equivalent of wanting to eat nothing but junk for every meal until anything not junk no longer tastes good.

Or having sustained, strong, complex relationships with others in community! That is also a bulwark for the character!
posted by Frowner at 12:55 PM on September 30 [4 favorites]

>These people need to be taxed a lot harder, frankly. If they have so much money that they can throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at this kind of masturbatory paranoia about the DEI monster

I don’t think I quite understand what you mean.

This is a middle-class county with median income about $82,000, and the council members aren’t paying for these lawsuits out of their own pockets. They are paying for it with public money that they took away from health initiatives.
posted by bq at 1:07 PM on September 30

When they started campaigning for this right-wing nonsense, the organizing was funded by individual contributions from awful, awful people - it's in one of the articles linked from the OP. I just think about what it would take for me to even have thousands of dollars to fund some political garbage - I feel good when I can throw twenty or thirty bucks at a fundraiser or something that matters to me. Our national story about MAGA types is that they are all facing tough times and upset about that, but usually it's, like, people who own car dealerships. That's why it was all those flotillas for Trump, that's why all those people on January 6 could afford to get away from work and spend all that money going to DC - most of them were probably using PTO!
posted by Frowner at 1:31 PM on September 30 [5 favorites]

No one feels that they have a lot of money, to continue, but if you can make thousands of dollars in political donations, most of the time you have a lot of money. There are a few true believers who starve themselves to feed the political machine, but in general if you can afford that kind of thing, you have most of your needs and wants taken care of.
posted by Frowner at 1:40 PM on September 30 [1 favorite]

And one last comment because it's relevant - I apologize for not leading with it.Joe Moss, the founder of Ottowa Impact, owns two businesses and received $38,000 from his mother (out of $150,000 in donations) to run the campaign. How many people do you know who can give their kids $38,000 in cash for a non-emergency? You might know people who could cash out retirement if their kids needed cancer treatment or were homeless, or you might know people who have saved up so that they can pay for their kids' college or give them a downpayment on a house, but do you know someone who could just write a $38,000 check so that their kid could run for some county office? That's what I mean about too much spending money distorting politics. I mean for pete's sake, make your kitchen over if your money is burning a hole in your pocket - at least that will create some jobs.
posted by Frowner at 1:54 PM on September 30 [1 favorite]

The hell of it they probably also have as modern and updated a home as they like and other creature comforts, and have the money to blow on top of that.

Eat the rich.
posted by Reverend John at 2:24 PM on September 30