Putting the "TS" back in T. S. Eliot

Governance can be a tricky proposition. It's not just trying to do the right thing, it's doing it the right way and sometimes the end justifies the means and sometimes it doesn't.

Here in Norwich, CT, we have a City Council that was in such a hurry to rid itself of the City Manager that it got a little too crafty for its own good and conducted a large amount of the "people's business" out of the line of the sight of the very people who elected them. They still separated themselves from the services of that City Manager, but earned a visit and a 'workshop' (which is like a time out for municipal officials) from the State of CT Freedom of Information Act Commission.

Norwich has had an acting City Manager for a couple or three (or more) months now and the last anyone knew was that the search committee (which happens to also be the City Council. How amazing a coincidence is that? It'd be like learning Pam Anderson is also a member of Mensa, don't you think?) had narrowed its choice to three people. Over the weekend, there were print reports a selection has been made and negotiations are ongoing with the aim of announcing the hiring at next Monday's City Council meeting, 19 November.

Strangely enough, that 19 November meeting was convened originally to address a zoning variance that wouldn't have been ready for a vote anyway, and the variance was subsequently withdrawn at the request of the same developers who recruited three members of the City Council as sponsors for it in August. All three alderpersons were unsuccessful in their bids for re-election last Tuesday. While both local daily newspapers have speculated as to the causes for those defeats, neither has done any (much less enough) research to draw any fact-based conclusions as to the reasons.

In the midst of a very busy election season, there were no special convenings of the City Council, meeting as the Search Committee. These meetings would have been in Executive Session as personnel matters would have been discussed but decisions made in Executive Session would still need to be made a matter of public record (assuming a vote was taken to choose a candidate) when the Executive Session ended, but nothing was.

So now the question is how could there be an agreement to hire someone, when for the record, nothing has been agreed to? It is, said Yul Brynner in another context, 'a puzzlement to me'. Perhaps the CT State Freedom of Information Act Commission gives a discount to a municipality that needs more than one visit in the same calendar year.

Joseph Conrad may have had his locus skewed in the Heart of Darkness. Perhaps it's more than likely to be in each of us and does, indeed, shape the way the world will end. 'Mistah Kurtz-he dead.' But for The Hollow Men (and Woman), it's not with a bang, but a whimper.
-bill kenny