David Michael Miller
Nine of the 20 members of Madison’s Common Council, which meets in the City County Building, were replaced on April 2.
The Common Council needs to focus on things like service cuts, public health and the social justice issues that impact people's lives directly.
The Madison city council is looking bad.
The city is facing the worst budget deficit in recent history, bullets are flying everywhere and we’re in the midst of a pandemic. But what’s the council focused on right now? Who uttered a deeply offensive word near the end of a late night meeting several weeks ago.
As a long, tense meeting on Sept. 2 (it began on Sept. 1) was winding down a female member of the public was about to speak at the Zoom meeting when a male voice was heard saying the ugly word. Several alders accuse Ald. Paul Skidmore and it’s true that Skidmore was the last person to speak and that he has tangled with the speaker, Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores, over police matters. Skidmore is the most staunch council supporter of the Madison Police Department and the council had just approved the new police monitor position and oversight board before the word was said.
Skidmore vehemently denies the allegation and he’s hired a lawyer. Kilfoy-Flores has filed a formal complaint accusing Skidmore and calling for his removal from office.
Fourteen council members have demanded that Skidmore come clean and they’ve threatened an investigation to get to the bottom of it. Those 14 alders also took issue with Council President Sheri Carter and Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway for suggesting that the council has experienced an overall erosion of decorum. The 14 claim that’s not true. They want to keep the focus on Skidmore alone.
But ironically one of the alders demanding the investigation into what Skidmore did or did not say is Ald. Max Prestigiacomo. That alder reposted a flyer on his personal Facebook page calling for people to go to Kenosha in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake and “mess things up.” Except the flyer didn’t use the word “mess,” but an expletive.
And Carter has accused Ald. Rebecca Kemble of using foul language to describe the mayor and her supporters.
But wait there’s more. The city attorney has warned the 14 alders that their letter may have violated open meetings laws since it would appear that a majority of the 20 council members must have contacted each other in a nonpublic setting to agree on the letter. And now Skidmore’s lawyer is threatening legal action if the council sanctions Skidmore because of that potential open meetings law violation.
On Tuesday the council voted to spend up to $10,000 to do a forensic analysis of the recording of the September meeting in the hopes of determining if it really was Skidmore who said what was said.
At this point you’d be justified in throwing up your hands and saying something along the lines of, “oh for cryin’ out loud.”
Look, I’m not big on public apologies. It’s usually just a political game. One side feigns deep offense and demands an apology. In the rare cases when the accused actually does apologize the apology is never gracefully accepted. That’s because the demand was bogus to begin with. The point was never to get a heartfelt apology, offer forgiveness and move on. The point was to ground the alleged offender into the dust.
But in this case it seems like an apology from Prestigiacomo and from Skidmore (if it turns out he did in fact say the word) and from the 14 alders if they violated the open meetings law would be in order. Then each alder should be forgiven by the council and everybody else and we should just move on to dealing with the real problems the city faces.
Let me be clear about a few things. Ald. Skidmore strongly denies this allegation and there’s an investigation that could help answer the question of who said what. We should all wait for that. And secondly, I’m not making any judgements about which indiscretions might have been more serious than others. Some readers will take deep offense at one thing and not so much at another.
My point is that to me, and I think to a lot of average Madisonians, this all looks like a lot of unnecessary drama and a distraction from things like service cuts, public health and the social justice issues that impact their lives directly.
We live in tense times. People under pressure sometimes say (or post) stupid things. The measure of any group of people is how well it deals with the tension and the almost inevitable bad behavior it engenders. Can the group find a way to move beyond the distractions and focus on its mission, which in this case is serving all the people of Madison?
Right now it looks like the Madison city council is coming up way short.
