By most accounts, Mike Pope is a very odd fellow. He has certainly lived up to that reputation with his involvement in city government over the last six years.
According to people employed by the city at the time, one of Pope’s first hijinks was secretly recording his 2005 phone conversations with the then-city clerk while he was complaining about the expansion of the Villa Hills AmeriStop shopping center. When he thought he found a “smoking gun” in his conversations, he e-mailed a file of his recordings to the council and city attorney. Everyone The Martin Chronicles has spoken to says the “smoking gun” was nothing more than a figment of Pope’s very active imagination. Huge surprise.
Based on the assurances from then-councilman Mike Martin that he was going to run for mayor, Mike Pope originally filed as a city council candidate in 2006. Martin lost his nerve at the filing deadline (too bad, can you imagine what a better place the city would be if Martin was in the first year of his second term as mayor?!?) In early October 2006, Pope withdrew his council candidacy and re-filed as a write-in candidate for mayor.
Pope’s 2006 mayoral campaign was a classic. On the Saturday prior to the election, reports say he had an encounter with the Villa Hills police. Why? Because he was pounding on the door of his opponent at about eight o’clock at night and scared holy heck out of his opponent’s wife. Oh, by the way. His opponent wasn’t even home. True to form, Pope put an audio file of his bizarre encounter on his crackpot campaign website. What do you hear? Pope saying, “I’m approaching the door. You can hear the leaves. The light is on. The light is off. Can you hear the dogs barking?” Alrighty then. How do you spell L-U-N-A-T-I-C?
Next up, Pope became a councilman. In his successful 2008 and 2010 council campaigns, Pope promised to get rid of the dreaded $40 sticker tax. You could say that the majority of council wasn’t on his side, so he couldn’t keep that promise. Hold on! That excuse would only hold water if Pope had once made a motion to repeal the sticker tax. But he hasn’t. Three years on council and not one attempt. Nada, zip, zero,
How about Pope’s alternative reality city website? He uses it to post screeds against his “enemies” on city council that would make the Unabomber proud. The best? He alleged that council held a “secret meeting” a while back. The problem with such an allegation is that he was accusing his council mates of doing something highly illegal. Meeting minutes show Pope was in attendance at the very meeting he described as “secret”. Weird. When Pope was called on the carpet, his best defense was that his story was “a joke”. Pretty funny Mr. Pope.
Given these few examples of Mike Pope’s “unusual” behavior, we have a question for him. Echoing those famous lines from the movie Fight Club, we ask, “When you’re insane, as you obviously are, do you know it? Do you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, WOW, I am (EXPLETIVE) crazy!”
Despite Pope’s dreadful first two years on council, the voters chose to re-elect him in 2010. Given the lack of attention Villa Hills’ voters seemed to pay to the local election in 2010-will they make the same mistake in 2012?
