Reaume & Co. Caving On Amphitheater Is Too Little, Too Late

It was a very strange Plymouth Township Board of Trustees meeting last night. Many odd things indeed. For the first time in several meetings, Supervisor Reaume wasn’t hammering away with his gavel. For the first time in awhile, there was not a Plymouth Township Police Officer stationed at the door, but strangest of all, for the first time that I can remember, there was nobody that chose to comment in the first opportunity for the public to comment. Yep, that was strange. Beyond strange. I actually think it might have spooked certain members of the Board.

So why did the taxpayers keep so ominously quiet? This was a full house as usual, and yet when public comment came around, you could have heard a pin drop. They kept quiet because they were not quite sure how to react to Supervisor Reaume’s latest bombshell. They wanted to see what the monthly shell game was all about, before reacting.

After a raucous meeting last month, where Reaume and company forced taxpayers to wait a couple hours, only to slap them down with a 4-3 vote refusing to postpone the amphitheater project, Reaume suddenly had a change of heart. He suddenly brought the amphitheater project back, and made a motion to stop action on it, and remove it from Capitol Improvement Projects to Community Park Recreation and Open Space and Greenway Plan.

That is a complicated way of saying that the amphitheater project is done for at least the next year, but not completely forgotten, because they will consider putting it in this other plan for the future. On first glance, it can be considered a win for the taxpayers, but the question is why did he do this?

After months of contentious meetings, after months of hostility between this Board and it’s taxpayers, and after the last meeting when people were begging them to stop this nonsense, and they flatly refused to do so, why did this Board suddenly have a change of heart?

I could maybe see Reaume having a change of heart. Or maybe Conzelman deciding to jump ship, or maybe Kay Arnold’s consience suddenly getting the best of her, but all four? All four have a change of heart in one single week after all these months of digging their feet in the sand and refusing to listen?

We saw last month that Mike Kelly had a change of heart, and brought a resolution to the Board to postpone this issue, but he was shot down by Arnold, Reaume, Clerk Conzelman, and of course Treasurer Edwards. Edwards made a point of stating in no uncertain terms that, “We borrowed the money, and we are going through with this project.”

It doesn’t get any more clear than that. It was crystal clear. Kay Arnold said, “That’s what we are elected to do.” Heck, you’d think that after all this time, at least these two would stick to their guns on this amphitheater but they didn’t. So all four of them, after months and months of stubbornly staying the course, had a change of heart, all in the same week. Why? It defies logic.

I know that they have already spent taxpayer money on this project. They hired architectural firm Beckett and Raeder to draw up some preliminary plans, and I’m sure they didn’t do that work for free. So why, after all this time, after all this fighting with the taxpayers, after spending taxpayer money on some sort of plans, did they just up and quit?

Okay, I’m done teasing. We all know why. After the last meeting, folks were finally done. They were done playing these silly games with this Board, they were done begging them to do the right thing, and they were done paying these folks to do a job, and watching them fail so miserably at it.

Township resident, Chris Hunter stated that, “There is always going to be change, I understand that, I look forward to change, and I look forward to changing this Board.” Well guess what? He was serious. He was dead serious, and so was every single taxpayer in that room. A little over a week later, recall petitions were filed at the Wayne County Clerk’s office. It seems that the Plymouth Township taxpayers have some serious changes in mind.

They are not just looking to recall Supervisor Reaume, but they are going after Treasurer Edwards, Clerk Conzelman, and Trustee Arnold as well. Poof! There you have it! That seems like a pretty good reason why all four of these folks would suddenly have an abrupt change of heart on this amphitheater debacle.

You can go to the Board meetings and beg them to do the right thing, and it falls on deaf ears, you can picket the meetings, and it falls on deaf ears, write letters, make phone calls, put up lawn signs, bring in the TV news, and it all falls on deaf ears. But if you jeopardize their spot at the public trough, suddenly they take you seriously. If you put their six figure salaries at risk, they suddenly have an abrupt change of heart.

Heck, they didn’t even make the folks wait all night for a decision this time either. This item was the #1 on the agenda. So suddenly they care about the taxpayers time as well. It’s amazing what a good old fashioned recall effort will do to improve the manners of our elected officials. It was a beautiful thing to see. Reaume was still a bit snarky, but that’s just in his DNA. At least he didn’t go nuts with his gavel this time, so there is that.

So it’s a win for the taxpayers right? Not so quick.

I don’t trust these people. In my experience, they are way too narcissistic, even with a recall looming, to just give up. These folks don’t like losing, they don’t like admitting they are wrong, and they seriously don’t like the unwashed masses telling them what to do.

I honestly think that at least some of them don’t care about the recall. I think Big Ron Edwards thinks that he is so bulletproof, he can survive it. So let’s play devils advocate here. Let’s assume that they are in the bowels of the Township Hall laughing at the recall folks. What could cause an abrupt halt to the amphitheater?

I think it is the pavilion project. I am hearing rumblings that the $625,000 pavilion project is coming back with a much higher price tag. Remember the air conditioned pavilion they are building at Township Park? I do, and I remember when they first brought it up. It was in July of 2012 when this whole mess started.

Reaume showed up, and wanted Board approval of a $100,000 grant from the State. It was called a Land and Water Conservation Fund Grant, or some such thing, and it was contingent on building this multi-purpose pavilion. There was some discussion, but Reaume said it was imperative that the Board act on it that very night, or they would lose the grant. I thought this was fishy. Reaume said that the pavilion would cost $350,000, and they had another $86,000 towards the project.

I wrote about this a week or so later, and I just thought something smelled rotten in Denmark. If Reaume had done so much work in getting Wayne County, Johnson Controls, and I think Bosch to contribute to the project, how could he forget to bring it to the Board for study until just days before the deadline for the $100,000 grant from the state? This was the lion’s share of the grant money for gosh sakes.

Well that is how Reaume works. He waits until the last possible second, and then springs these things on the Board, and on the taxpayers, forcing a vote with little or no proper study. So they approved the grant, I wrote my op-ed on it, which strongly recommended against it, and everyone pretty much forgot about it. Except for myself.

So nine months later, at the infamous Very Special Meeting of the Plymouth Township Board of Trustees, Reaume, Edwards, Conzelman, and Arnold voted for a 1.9 million bond, with the big ticket items being the amphitheater, and the pavilion. The price of the $350,000 pavilion had gone up though. It was now $625,000. It’s funny, because Trustee Doroshewitz actually remembered something about that July meeting, and when he questioned Reaume about the $625,000 figure, Reaume got a sudden case of amnesia. Said he didn’t recall anything about cost estimates. Well this drove me nuts, and I stood up and informed Reaume in a very clear voice that he had promised a $350,000 price tag.

I then exited the building, followed closely by a Plymouth Township Police Officer. I may have missed the rest of the meeting, but I was at least able to refresh Reaume’s memory.

So this is the history of the pavilion. I hear that before I moved to Plymouth Township, they had an estimate of around $80,000 for this pavilion. So it went from $80,000, to $350,000, to the current estimate of $625,000. Now I am hearing rumblings that $625,000 is not enough to pay for this opulent pavilion in Edward’s Park. Could it end up costing a cool million? Who knows at this point.

When questioned by Trustee Doroshewitz about where the $350,000 for the amphitheater will go, Reaume got really cagey. Doroshewitz tried his best to get an answer out of Reaume, even tried to get him to set the money aside until a final decision is made about the amphitheater, but Reaume wouldn’t bite. He refused to say anything about where the taxpayer’s money will be spent. Doesn’t he get it? This is why these fools have a recall hanging over their heads for cripes sake!

A gentleman outside the Township Hall after the meeting said it best, when he said, “They don’t need an amphitheater for puppet shows in the park, they have puppet shows right here at the Township Hall.”

So to conclude, I have a sneaky suspicion that the four horsemen, knowing that they can’t afford to do the amphitheater & the pavilion, have decided to scrap the amphitheater for now, and build their little Taj Mahal in the park. In their scheming little minds, this move would take care of paying for the pavilion, and do away with that pesky little recall thing.

Well I got a little news flash for the folks on the Plymouth Township Board of Trustees. These folks ain’t buying it. They don’t believe anything you say. And even if the amphitheater is off the table forever, and I don’t think it is, it will be too little, too late...