Panning for Dirt

OK, so tonight's meeting (to clarify: tonight's continuation of last week's special meeting, which came before tonight's "real" meeting) was a goldmine of dirt, as it were. Just to move some things from notes to blog, here are some of the things we learned, through the questions and statements. A lot of this stuff was only spoken of in fairly vague terms, so this is necessarily a bit of "paraphrase of a paraphrase," but that's what we've got to work with.

• - Copeland has a really, really bad credit history. Late property tax payments, unpaid judgements, lawsuits pending, the works. I got the feeling that even those "Bad Credit Not A Problem!" used car salesmen on the TV ads wouldn't offer to lend him a dime if he paid them back in advance.

• - None of it is his fault. He just has bad luck. And malicious enemies, like the conspiracy of hardcore smoking activists who ousted him from the District 5 Council in St. Paul. Exactly the kind of luck and enemies we should look for our city managers to have. (Expect a new requisite to be added to the job description whenever they get the process rolling for a permanent replacement: "Must have been struck by lightning at least once, preferably twice or more." That would substitute nicely for the previous silly stuff about relevant job experience or education.)

• - Mayor Longrie was delighted that he has often stayed in public service positions for a long, long time. Not just a year or a term, nosirree. Really long time, like three terms, each term itself several years long. Think she was hinting at something?

• - The cops in St. Paul have visited his house. A lot. Did I hear 84 calls in one year? That's more than 1.6 times per week. I don't even visit my favorite restaurant that often. What's up with that?

• - That vast emptiness on the job part of his resume is because he hasn't held a job in more than a decade. Due to the aforementioned bad luck (involving accidents, malicious insurers, malevolent health care providers, and maybe underpants gnomes, for all we know), of course. Despite not having the time for a job, his resume is full of volunteer political activities. So we're to believe he had plenty of time to run a state senate race against Mee Moua, and serve on the St Paul Charter Commission, but even in the late-'90s expansion (when the problème du jour was low unemployment and not enough workers -- one state fact sheet declared, "it seems that job opportunities in Minnesota have never been better"), he couldn't find time to drop off an application at Burger King or something.

• - But wait, you say! He had a consulting business on that resume! So he was employed! Well, that "business" apparently has had a grand total of two clients, neither of which paid him anything: Bob Zick and Rich O'Connor. Zick, who is close to Longrie & Co. (and has a long history of losing elections in Maplewood, in between rants on cable access TV, where he produces a show with Longrie's husband), declined to tell the council minority anything about Copeland's consulting work; O'Connor said Copeland was an unpaid volunteer.

• - He could have declared bankruptcy ("Dude, you TOTALLY should have!" to paraphrase Hjelle), but Copeland says he's too proud. I guess it's better to go on not paying your debts, not getting a job, and letting the court judgements stack up, while waiting for your business partner's wife to score you a cushy job as her personal lapdog/break-in artist in some suburb. Somehow it doesn't fill me with confidence to hear that this guy ranks "saving my pride" above "reading the writing on the wall" when it comes to financial decisions. That's the kind of thinking that turns little problems into massive debacles.

• - A grand jury indicted Copeland for forging false campaign materials. Copeland and Longrie spent a long time explaining that it wasn't really forgery, and it wasn't really an indictment, because his record was subsequently expunged. After he admitted to it and did 100 hours of community service and agreed to not to break the law any more. So really, it's like he never did anything wrong in the first place.

OK, I have to stop at this one. Putting aside the hilarity of the Clintonesque parsing exercise over whether or not he was "indicted" of "forgery," is there any doubt that this is EXACTLY THE KIND OF FREAKING THING THAT YOU LOOK FOR IN A BACKGROUND CHECK? This is a guy who happily broke the law and lied when it served his short-term political goals. I don't care if the district judge constructed a time machine to take Copeland's future self back to stop his past self from doing it in the first place, the point is that this is a guy who would pull this kind of stunt, and then obfuscate to make it sound like he was exonerated in a court of law (rather than having his record expunged after fulfilling his sentence). Not just would, but DID!

I mean, if you were hiring a cashier, and your background check found out that they had been indicted for stealing from another employer, but after doing their community service the crime was expunged from their record -- would you say, "Well, it's like it never happened then! Running the till? Shucks, let me entrust you with my ATM card and PIN number too."

• - Oh, and those 100 hours of community service? They were apparently logged in a charity on whose board he served, and of which his wife was the president.

• - At some point Copeland sued KSTP-TV for trespassing. He won the case. The judgement in his favor: $1.

Interestingly, KSTP-TV (Channel 5) covered the council meeting tonight, and mentioned citizen activism like this blog and the Maplewood Citizens League. And they seemed to like my "clowncil" idea.

Now I just need to lure some people into showing up at future council meetings dressed as clowns. Sort of like camo, so they could blend in...