Tonight the Sylvania City Council held its first public meeting since the election in which Issue 16 passed and two of the Gang of Four were unseated, and this time I was in attendance. It proved rather an interesting scene.

Our mayor, Mr Craig Stough, indicated that he had engaged in some discussions with the Metroparks, who are expected to manage operations of the Lathrop House once it is moved and opened for tours. Mr Stough suggested it would be more common for him to have formal approval of Council for these negotiations. Councilman Barbara Sears obliged by submitting a motion to formally re-grant authorization for Mr Stough to conduct these negotiations. Her motion was seconded and the rather muted fireworks began as the matter was cast open to discussion. Some of the potential obstacles which remain were illuminated.

Councilman John Billis, soon to no longer be a Councilman himself, took a subtly hostile position with the precise wording of the Issue language (that "the City of Sylvania shall not acquire the property known as the Lathrop House property and 5362 South Main Street, Sylvania, Ohio by appropriation;" and "the City of Sylvania shall not re-file any such action, or file a similar action for appropriation of the Lathrop property for a period of two years from the date of the enactment of this Ordinance." The full text of Issue 16 as it appeared on the ballot can be found here.)

Billis's position was that this language, explicitly forbidding appropriation of the property, fundamentally forbids as well any appropriation for the property; playing on the twin meanings of the word (in the first case, to expropriate, in the second case to allocate.) So Billis staked out the position that the City shouldn't spend any money on this issue at all, including any contribution to moving the house.

In fairness to Mr Billis, Mr Stough did acknowledge that he and other members of Council had been troubled all along by some of the precise Issue language, but that everyone knew that Billis's interpretation hadn't been anyone's intent. But Mr Billis's statement began a great movement away from compromise, now that the voters had decreed that a compromise was essential, which movement would unfortunately continue through many of the subsequent speakers.

One woman in the audience stood up and, reading a prepared statement, said that much of Citizens for Sylvania's campaign literature had been misleading and baseless, and that besides that it now constituted something of a legally binding campaign promise. She singled out Mrs Sears and Mr Kriner for having endorsed Issue 16, leading both to state for the record that this (emphatically) was not true. Still she continued to insist Mrs Sears had endorsed the Issue, till Mrs Sears flatly stated "Did not," beyond which the matter was not pursued. The speaker insisted that Citizens for Sylvania's campaign promises were binding but that they should not have included any consideration of the previous promises by Friends of the Lathrop House (hereafter FOLH) for funding to contribute to the move. She tacked on the rather surprising notion that Citizens for Sylvania was being insensitive to African Americans because of their stance on this whole issue.

Another woman in the audience stood up and read from another prepared statement, at considerable length, claiming essentially the same thing. She darkly hinted that the voters had been misled by Citizens for Sylvania's various promises, perhaps implying that the vote should therefore be set aside at least in spirit if not in fact (if that wasn't her intent, I'm not honestly sure what was). She made quite a point of mentioning that she was not speaking in an official capacity for FOLH, perhaps fearful of accidentally committing to anything. Much actual applause behind me when she was finished.

At this point some young man whose name I really wish I had caught, sharply attired in a red jogging suit quite inappropriate for the occasion, stood up to a chorus of hisses and quietly snarky remarks from immediately behind me. This fellow, evidently prominent in the Citizens for Sylvania campaign, said essentially can't we all just get along, which evidently was not satisfactory to the FOLH contingent, then insisted he was still looking for funding to try to move the house. He was evasive about where his campaign dollar figures came from, except to allow that the $150,000 relocation costs he had cited rather incredibly didn't include costs to excavate and prepare the new site. More hisses, not altogether unjustifiably, at this.

Another woman spoke, who angled toward forbidding Council from spending any money to help move the house by saying that Citizens for Sylvania's ads had specifically said that approval of Issue 16 would "stop wasting taxpayers' money." She suggested this implied a binding (or at least misleading, I forget precisely which horse she was hitched to by now) campaign promise, and that either that was why she had voted for it in the first place, or why she would have voted for it, if she had voted for it, which it didn't sound like she had. She got the mayor and the City's Law Director, Mr Jim Moen, to instruct her how to go about getting her own ballot initiative going to prohibit the City contributing funding to the relocation of the house. Much tittering of approval from behind me.

Sigh. So much heat, so little light.

I don't think Mr Billis's casuistic parsing of the language on the ballot issue holds water. Lots of words mean two things, and in this case "appropriation of the property" means quite clearly "expropriation of the property." The interpretation suggested by Billis would be credible only if the phrase "appropriation for the property" appeared in the ballot language, which then could scarcely be interpreted in the original, expropriation, sense. I was surprised Mr Moen waffled on this issue when pressed. He should clearly repudiate that argument now, before Mr Stough either negotiates from a position of great ambiguity, or (worse) negotiates terms which his Law Director may subsequently say are illegal.

The rest of the arguments all are more or less the same and so I'll address them together in a minute. The business about the campaign promises is a little troubling, but presently only a little. It does seem Citizens for Sylvania played a bit loose with the truth, giving only the cost for the move but not for the new site preparation. I'd be interested to know the legal relationship between St Josephs and Citizens for Sylvania.

But the numbers don't matter that much, at least not to me. I truly don't care much about the house either way; the historic credentials are ambiguous, and I'm just not that sentimental about it. This is impolitic to say, but I can get away with this since I'm not running for office. I supported Issue 16 because of property rights, and the much bigger issue is what fundamentally FOLH is now urging.

If the house is so important, and the site itself indispensable, the City could have bought it and its land when they were for sale. Or FOLH could have bought it. But then they would have had to pay for it, which ultimately the City evidently came to terms with during its eminent domain campaign.

But that's really the point. In this country we usually make people pay for the things they want. St Joseph wanted the land, they wanted to demolish the house, and they wanted to build a school where the house once stood. And they were willing to pay for all these things.

The position of FOLH is, basically, that they want to excercise authority over a piece of property, which authority normally comes from owning that property, without the muss or fuss of actually having to buy it. They want the house to remain undisturbed, but they don't wan't to pay for it. Since that idea was rejected by the voters, they now want the house moved instead of demolished, and they don't want to pay for that either. And now they rather spitefully don't want the City to either. They want the Church to pay for it alone. Usually people who take things they want but don't pay for them are fundamentally, at best, confidence men and card sharps. FOLH seems genuinely uninterested in compromise, only rather petulantly concerned with getting their own way. For free.

Were I a St Joseph parishoner or administrator, I'd be wishing that the house had been promptly demolished under cover of darkness the moment the demolition permit had been issued, for all the good two years of negotiations have produced. And I'd be questioning the legality of the City not reissuing that permit, since presumably the church had met all the application requirements and the voters have ruled that the City has no eminent domain interest in the site.

For myself, I found all the talk fascinating and horrible to watch. I hope the inauguration of the new Councilmen will put paid to some of this spiteful grasping and that an amicable compromise can actually be reached. I may prepare a few remarks to make at the next Council meeting in case more of this is indulged next month.

In the end, Mrs Sears's motion to authorize Mayor Stough's negotiation efforts was passed 5-2, with only Mr Billis and Mrs Scheidel voting against. Score one step for Council back in the right direction.

JKS.

Tomorrow: less politics, at last! Or maybe more. You be the judge.