Remember the giant public relations nightmare for the council majority exactly three years ago? It involved the cutting of a dozen trees in Orpheus park for no apparent reason, without any explanation for urgency or purpose and the sh*&tstorm that followed? The city council majority and the city manager, then Phil Cotton, emailed each other, constituents and Dan Dalager even hiked down to the elementary school to verbally beat up on the teachers.
It was a monstrous failure for the so-called leaders Dalager, Stocks and Bond. It was gross incompetence for the city manager and staff to completely ignore the newly issued draft plan of the Urban Forestry Management Plan and a legal dereliction of duty by the city attorney. Several weeks of public speakers at council meetings did not elicit ethical responses from the majority.
During a council meeting on the Sunshine Ordinance policy months later, Dalager offers a kind of apology for that gross misconduct and then utters a revealing admission.
Former Mayor Dalager's yammering fact-free monologue of his recalled error in "too much transparency" yarn held a punch line revealing his habit of deleting everything from his email. Sabine, city attorney, immediately qualified / cleaned up the self-incriminating statements by keeping Dan's magical receptacle in play and telling him he really doesn't do what he just admitted doing. The city attorney presented himself here more like consigliere, quite unlike a public servant.
Update: For those unfamiliar with the back story of the Orpheus Park tree cutting, there will be further council meeting clips to come. In the meantime, a news account with the apt title, "Trees and Sunshine" is linked here.
