Township Residents Call Price Appointment A Fix

The taxpayers of Plymouth Township came to a meeting on Thursday night to watch the Plymouth Township Board of Trustees pick a replacement supervisor. They were hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. Pretty much everybody thought the fix was in, but Trustee Mike Kelly teased them with some of his comments at the interview meeting. We shall deal with Mr. Kelly later, but first lets look at the numbers, and the votes, and see if township residents were actually correct when they claimed that this whole process was a “fix” like they claim in the picture above.

First, let’s look at my unscientific poll on how residents felt the candidates performed. I asked 20 random township residents, some of them I knew, and some of them I didn’t know, who the top three candidates were after the interviews. I did this the same way that the Board of Trustees broke their numbers down to reduce the field to three candidates, but I will show the top five candidates.

1. Kurt Heise---------- 42 points.
2. Bob Doroshewitz---25 points
3. Ray Byers-----------22 points.
4. Chuck Curmi--------15 points
5. Shannon Price--------8 points.

This is how the 6 members of the Plymouth Township Board of Trustees voted.

Chuck Curmi--------Ray Byers---- Bob Doroshewitz--Kurt Heise

Bob Doroshewitz---Ray Byers----Kurt Heise----------Chuck Curmi

Mike Kelly----------Ron Bullotta—Shannon Price-----Kurt Heise

Ron Edwards-------Shannon Price—Mark Cords------Chuck Curmi

Nancy Conzelman- Shannon Price—Mark Cords------Steven Birmingham

Kay Arnold----------Shannon Price---Mark Cords------Steven Birmingham

Their results looked like this:

1. Shannon Price-----11
2. Ray Byers-----------6
3. Mark Cords---------6
4. Kurt Heise-----------4
5. Ron Bullotta---------3
6. Bob Doroshewitz---2
7. Chuck Curmi--------2
8. Steven Birmingham-2

So let’s examine the results. Kurt Heise, the taxpayers choice as the overwhelming winner of the debate/interview ended up in 4th place, and out of the running, not able to even get a final three spot from the board. Bob Doroshewitz, who came in second from the taxpayers, finished 6th in the vote of the board. Ray Byers, was the only consensus choice of the taxpayers, and the board.

So why was Heise left out of the final vote? How could they have messed that up so bad? A good answer to that question, is that Ron Edwards does not like Kurt Heise. A better answer to that question is that Ron Edwards recruited Shannon Price to replace Richard Reaume. So Ron Edwards got together with his voting block of Nancy Conzelman, and Kay Arnold, and told them to make Price their number one pick, and told them not to cast even one vote for Heise. It sounds evil, but remember, this is Ron Edwards we are talking about.

That made the score 9-0 before anyone else had a chance to vote. With their voting block, Heise never had a chance. It was over for him before they even took the vote. If you look at the results of the taxpayers poll, Price came in a distant 5th. This is most likely why folks think this whole thing was a fix, or as Bob Doroshewitz put it, a fraud.

Another thing to look at, is the voting patterns. Of eight candidates, there are countless ways the votes could come out, and yet Kay Arnold and Nancy Conzelman picked the exact three candidates, and not only that, they picked them in the exact same order. How does that magically happen with 8 different candidates that you can spot in 3 different places? It happens when you have a Trustee like Kay Arnold taking her marching orders from Nancy Conzelman, who takes her marching orders from Ron Edwards. All three of them voted Price and Cords and the only difference between the three was that Arnold and Conzelman chose a different 3rd place finisher. But as I said, by then, it was all a moot point. Mr. Price had the 3 all important 1st place votes.

With all due respect to Mr. Birmingham, and Mr. Cords, I think they were simply used as pawns. They were throwaway votes, used to keep Heise and Doroshewitz from getting any votes. Heise, Doroshewitz, and Byers were the clear choice of the taxpayers, and they never stood a chance. In my opinion, the taxpayers would have been happy with any of the candidates other than Price, but clearly, the favorites were Heise, Doroshewitz, Curmi, and Byers.

If you look at Byers, he was a solid choice of the taxpayers, and both Doroshewitz, and Curmi picked him top guy, but not the other four board members. Had they given him any votes at all, it could have actually put him above Price, and that would have made it very difficult to pick Price over Byers. So they threw their votes away to Cords, and Birmingham, to manipulate the final result. How could two board members feel that a candidate was strong, and the other four not even give him a vote? Looks fishy to me.

If you look at the resumes, if you look at the job histories, and you look at the interviews, you really have to wonder about a process that kept Heise and Doroshewitz out of the final three candidates. I can’t help but come to the conclusion, that the Plymouth Township residents were correct when they were holding up their signs. There is no other way you can honestly look at this thing.

Price just moved here in February for gosh sakes, and suddenly at the beginning of March, he comes out in the paper, and says that he is “intrigued” at the prospect of being the Supervisor? That fish smells, and it smells bad. If he were smarter, he would have kept his mouth shut about the whole thing until Mr. Reaume actually resigned. At least then, it would have had a tiny sliver of legitimacy.

So long story short, the top three candidates were Price with 11 points, and Byers and Cords tied with 6 points. Once the numbers were tabulated, President Pro-Tem, Nancy Conzelman immediately made a motion to appoint Shannon Price as Supervisor. This looked very scripted in a process that until that moment, was very unscripted. Again, they didn’t even bother to make it look fair. The taxpayers were angry, and the block of four just wanted to get their guy in, and get the heck out of there.

This is where Trustee Mike Kelly comes in. Mike Kelly is the ultimate tease. He rarely speaks at meetings, he almost always goes along with the voting block of Edwards Conzelman, Arnold, and formerly Reaume, but every now and then, he casts a vote against them. Every now and then, he’ll make a comment that gives taxpayers hope. Then he drops the bomb, votes with the block, and people go away sad. He is the king of teases.

Personally, he is the hardest of the board members for me to figure out. I remember when the board bought the disputed De Ho Co property. They brought it to the board for a price of $300,000 give or take, and he voted no on that purchase, and it went away. They brought it back later though, and at a price of over $600,000, and he voted yes for some crazy reason that he’d never explain. He is what they call a flip flopper. Usually the last person that can talk to these types of people are the ones who will ultimately get their vote. If you click on the other picture above, you’ll see the last candidate to talk to Mike Kelly after the interview process. It was Shannon Price. Not a big surprise.

Part of me thinks he is just clueless, and is out of his element on this board, and the other part of me thinks that he teases the folks just enough to squeak out another reelection. Well if the latter is true, he just teased the folks one too many times. He was the lowest vote getter of the four elected Trustees in the last election, and I see no chance for him to squeeze out another victory in 2016. There will most likely be a purge on the Board of Trustees, and Kelly is the most vulnerable. If one were thinking of running for a Trustee position, I would be campaigning directly against the kind of Trustee that he is.

So Kelly had one last shot at being a hero. He had one last shot at representing the taxpayers that hand him $11,000 a year. He could have voted no on the Price appointment, and sent this thing to a vote of the taxpayers. This whole issue came down to Trustee Mike Kelly of all people. The Tease.

When I sit and think about that, it just blows me away. The biggest internal decision this board has made in probably decades, and the guy to decide it was going to be the quietest board member, and the most unpredictable board member. There is no other way to look at it.

Mike Kelly picked Shannon Price as our new Supervisor. The man could have been a hero.

So Shannon Price was chosen in a 4-2 vote, and the taxpayers were more than a little angry. They’ll be angry for a very long time.

The best analogy of this whole process came from Bob Doroshewitz when he said, “Abraham Lincoln could have been up against Price tonight, and he would have lost.” Truer words have never been spoken, and I’m gonna hand it to Mr. Doroshewitz, he truly represented us taxpayers in the highest fashion at that meeting.

After the trustees had submitted their lists, he was so incensed with the proceedings that he cast his final no vote on Price, and then got up, and left this sham of a meeting, no longer wanting to be associated with this debacle. But before he did, he had some choice criticisms.

Of Price, he said that he personally likes the guy, but felt he wasn’t ready. I took that to mean that he has only lived in our township for a couple of months. He called out Edwards, Conzelman, and Arnold for refusing to vote for the guy (Heise) that, “clearly was heads and shoulders above the rest in the interviews.” And of course, he spoke about Lincoln not being able to get the job as well.

This is a guy who was running for the seat himself. This is a guy who maybe would not want to go against Heise in the final three. This is a guy for whom it would be in his best interests not to give Heise a vote. Yet he did. He not only voted for him, but he defended him after the process was completed.

Chuck Curmi is the other Trustee that was running for a spot, but put the will of the people before his own self interest. Chuck Curmi represents our taxpayers in the highest of manners, he is the most accessible member of this board, and he voted the will of the people on Thursday night, when it would have been to his advantage not to. I’m gonna tell you, I really respect Chuck Curmi, and I have from the first minute I met him. He is as honest as the day is long. We are lucky to have him on this board.

So now, I would ask you to look above, and look to see the top three candidates that were chosen by Bob Doroshewitz, and Chuck Curmi. They are the same top three candidates that the people who were polled chose. These two men represented the will of the people when no other board member would do so. It’s right there in black and white.

So you can look at all of this, and you can make your own choice as to whether this process was a “fix” or not. The choice is yours. I always say that if it squeals like a pig, and stinks like a pig, it certainly must be a pig. Well you can put all the perfume in France on this pig, and it is still going to stink...