Happy New Year!  It is time to celebrate a new era in Milton politics . . . a changing of the guard.

At tomorrow’s (January 3^rd) City Council, new council members Doug Hene and Phil Cranmer will be sworn in.  Current Council Member Carol Cookerly, who won re-election, will also take her oath of office.  Good tidings!

I encourage citizens to attend the January 3^rd swearing in.  Miltonites need to show strong support for the new and improved City Council and, more importantly, support for a return to plain sanity in City government.  It is important to send a strong message that Milton is closing the door on 1) the extreme government dysfunction (led by Paul Moore and Rick Mohrig) of the past two years and 2) the harmful factional politics that have plagued Milton for the past 17 years.  Let’s briefly discuss each of these topics.

Milton Government Dysfunction. Over the past two years, Milton’s strategic priorities largely languished because of several serious ethics issues; a focus on HOA minutiae; and an ill-conceived, dishonest, and unfair elections design/planning initiative.  Former Council Members Paul Moore and Rick Mohrig were at the center of these controversies that severely undermined citizen trust and damaged Milton’s reputation.

Factional Politics.  Mohrig and Moore’s misbehavior was a continuation of 17 years of endless factionalism that has roiled the city since its founding.  Milton’s two factions were the Bailey-Bentley-Moore faction and the Lusk-Kunz-Mohrig faction.  Often, the fighting between these querulous political cliques was positively middle school—the political equivalent of a school cafeteria food fight.  Personality politics dominated, while policy priorities often languished and principles of good governance were roundly ignored.

Fortunately, Milton’s voters were fed up with municipal government dysfunction and corrosive political factionalism.  In the recent November elections, voters roundly rejected the politics of yesteryear and Milton’s Old Guard.  Miltonites overwhelmingly delivered a clear mandate for change.  For the first time since its founding, Milton’s two factions will not be represented on City Council.  This coup occurred despite Milton’s two long-warring factions joining forces to support Rick Mohrig and newbie Helen Gordon.  Rick Mohrig barely managed to garner 40% of the vote.  And with Moore and Mohrig’s departures, Milton’s last political dinosaurs have waddled off the council dais.

This merger of factions was predictable and predicted . . . and is more thoroughly covered in previous blog posts.  Once they got past their personal dislike for each other, the Bailey-Bentley-Moore and Lusk-Kunz-Mohrig factions easily put aside their differences.  In actuality very little substantive differences exist between them.  As I learned the hard way, Milton’s two factions diverge little in their policy positions and certainly employ the same bush-league political tactics (e.g., abuse of various local and state ethics processes). 

Milton’s factions correctly calculated they were so weakened that their only chance to retain power was to combine forces.  In desperation, Milton’s factions also appealed to naked partisanship, forming an unholy alliance with Milton’s Lunatic Fringe.  We have seen the dire consequences of encouraging these fanatics with a troubling coarsening of politics in Milton . . . for example, hyper-partisans disrupting candidate meet-and-greets; Bill Lusk’s shameful marring of Milton’s Veterans’ Day commemoration; and even death threats to the Mayor, which these conspiratorial extremists cavalierly dismiss as a hoax.

Unfortunately, Milton has likely not heard the last from Milton’s political reactionaries.  In between the November election and their last council meeting (where they were awarded their participation trophies), Moore and Mohrig engaged in some political maneuvering that seems intended to sow future chaos at council and perhaps provide openings for a return to power.  However, their petty parting acts assume that citizens can be duped by thinly veiled traps designed to trip up their successors on council.  Fortunately, Milton’s voters are not so easily conned.  Presented with cold facts and irrefutable logic, Miltonites have consistently demonstrated their capacity for detecting political BS and firing the rascals. . . a lesson Milton’s Old Guard never learned . . . hence their demise.

Please consider attending January 3^rd’s City Council swearing-in of council members.  Please encourage friends and neighbors to also attend. Let’s send a clear message of support for the new city council.  Let’s voice strong hopes for a brighter future for Milton . . . a Milton free of factionalism and partisanship . . . a Milton where the rule of law is upheld and the focus is on citizens’ highest (i.e., strategic) priorities.

Advocating for a Better Milton,

Tim