The Martin Chronicles will take the cronyism, disregard for city ordinances and state statutes, persistent inability or unwillingness to fill open records requests, lawsuits, willful destruction of city property, unintelligible financial reports and other ethical "lapses" off the table for this post.
We want to focus on one issue that has cropped up recently in the comments made by the resigning Ethics Board chairman and in a recent letter to a councilman vaguely "signed" by "The Villa Hills Ethics Board".
What is the issue? The board members seem to think that information "leaked" to The Whistleblower Newswire and The Martin Chronicles is "undermining public confidence" in the Villa Hills city government. For the record, this is not the first time the Ethics Board took this bass-ackward view. They complained about the same thing during the turmoil under then-Mayor Steve Clark. How did that turn out?
Can they be serious? Sadly, we think the answer is "yes".
Why do we call that bass-ackward thinking? Did the members of the Ethics Board ever stop to think that it isn't the "leaked" information, but the highly questionable actions of the current city government being leaked to news outlets that is responsible for undermining public confidence?
Perhaps the Ethics Board would prefer the three chimpanzees' "See No Evil-Hear No Evil-Speak No Evil" approach? Maybe they think the head-in-the-sand ostrich has the right idea? The Ethics Board members may be adherents to Hogan's Heroes Sgt. Schultz' way of dealing with bad behavior, "I zee nuss-ing!"
Richard Nixon would have loved the Villa Hills Ethics Board. If they had investigated the Watergate break-in instead of Sam Ervin, Howard Baker and the rest of the Senate Select Committee, "Tricky Dick" could have finished his second term standing on his head.
Candidly, The Martin Chronicles wonders if the rest of the Ethics Board should follow their chairman's lead and go find something else to do.
