Cave: The Weakest Link

The folks at Maplewood Voices put up an audio clip from Monday's meeting, where the mayor discusses her "math" about possible open meeting law violations. According to Prof. Schultz, one of the council members confessed to violating the law. Longrie says that she didn't violate it. She also says Hjelle never let Prof. Schultz interview him, so it couldn't have been him.

I suppose she might like people to infer that either Rossbach or Jueneman confessed to a violation, but that defies logic, since they aren't a quorum and they're the minority in all the substantial votes that might be at issue. (I suppose Diana's supporters might like to believe that Rossbach, Jueneman and Cave conspired to agree to approve the minutes or agenda in advance of public discussion, and this is what Prof. Schultz is talking about.)

In effect, Diana pointed a big fat arrow at Rebecca Cave.

Of course, Rebecca couldn't violate the meeting alone. So that means that Diana is also calling Rebecca a liar, or she's saying Rebecca is ignorant and doesn't know what she's talking about.

Either way, it shows the contempt that Mayor Longrie actually has for Rebecca. Cave is just her empty-headed cheerleader (watch their body language closely in the meetings, as Diana all but says "you can go ahead and make this motion for me now, dearie"), and Diana will throw her under a bus in a heartbeat if it serves her agenda. As long as Rebecca faithfully and unquestioningly follows the mayor's lead, she'll get the pampering of a prized poodle -- but cross her on anything serious (those 4-1 votes where the mimes concern for fiscal responsibility after everyone else has voted don't count), and there will be hell to pay.

The information emerging also paints a picture of what may have happened. Here's the emerging likely scenario:

First of all, the mayor trusts Rebecca, as her protege lacking a will of her own, to follow her lead without asking questions. Had Diana appointed a convicted child molester, she trusted that Rebecca would have voted for him, out of fear of Diana if not blind trust. (As an anonymous pro-Diana individual puts it in our comments, "Could you even fathom a scenario where one of the three would have voted no on manager replacement? No." Mindless obedience is what Diana's followers celebrate.)

Hjelle is a bit more of a wild card. Unlike Rebecca, he was a winner in the open election. His voting pattern more often strays from Diana (though still not by much), and he often shows exasperation with the tedious way that she slows down the meetings to hear herself talk more. So to be sure of getting her way, Diana would likely have gone to Hjelle beforehand to know that he would support her move to install Copeland.

But Rebecca may not have been quite the empty puppet that Diana believes. Rebecca may herself have talked with Hjelle, perhaps with specific concerns about who to install in the position. They knew from the previous meeting that they needed someone, and Cave may have been concerned about the previous plan to elevate a person from the staff.

So if Cave asked Hjelle (remember, Hjelle and Cave's husbands are fellow firefighters, with their personal grudges against the old city manager and other people in city hall), which only makes sense, he might have reassured her that Diana was planning to nominate a friend of hers, who they could trust to do their bidding.

In spite of the mayor's contempt for her, Rebecca may have the intellect to put things together, and realize that this constituted a serial meeting and a textbook case of an open meeting law violation: a quorum coming to a decision on a course of action, outside of public meetings, specifically in order to avoid public discussions of the issue at hand. They wanted to avoid questions of "why not promote someone temporarily from within city hall, to maintain continuity?" and they wanted to avoid discussions of Copeland's background, details of his relationship to the mayor and her husband etc. The earlier the information on Copeland's background came out, the harder it would be to install him. By delaying the background check and discussion of it as long as possible, they were able to say, "See, those qualifications didn't matter -- he's been in the position for months, and the whole city has not caught fire and burned to the ground, so he's doing just great!!"

In any case, to be clear, the trio's explicit defense against the open meeting law is that they didn't really care about the qualifications of the interim manager and of course they were going to do whatever the mayor wanted without asking any questions. That's a heck of a defense for an elected leader to put forward.