Esrati

Meet the newest enemy to the Monarchy of Montgomery County

You’ve heard of 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon?

In Dayton, it’s rare you’re more than 1.2 degrees of separation from people, unless you are an elected official or hold a patronage job. Then the factor goes down to .2

If you could look at the list of Precinct Captains of the political parties central committee, and you had a list of public employees, the crossover factor would be amazing. Note, you also have to know who is married to whom, because sometimes, you have your spouse with a different name take a seat for you. I tried to pass an amendment to the Dem Party Constitution to prevent employees of elected officials from being the people who vote to endorse and support candidates and was thoroughly outvoted.

But, if that was our only problem in Montgomery County, we’d be on easy street. The huge problem we have is that we have too much government, too many governments, elected officials, meetings, jurisdictions, websites, courts, police departments, tax offices, tax rates, street maintenance departments, libraries, trustees, school boards, parks and recs departments, building inspectors, school superintendents, zoning departments, the list goes on. Each of these duplicative and unnecessary organizations adds tax overhead on the citizens of Montgomery County. It also adds lots of opportunity for graft, corruption, incompetence, complexities and the list goes on.  The biggest problem is that with limited media to act as a watchdog, you now have to hope and pray that some of your neighbors take up the job of citizen journalists and investigate and publish their observations.

• For the shitshow known as Dayton Public Schools, you can count on former School Board Member Mario Gallin who has a Facebook page she keeps up to date. She looks at agendas, budgets, and watches the countless onerous meetings like a hawk.
• In Centerville, the feckless City Manager, Wayne (Mr. Mary Kate Huffman, Judge) Davis, had already alienated so many staff members that left, but then he forced out a long term police sgt. who was on track for promotion. Next thing you know, there’s a facebook group, Support Sgt. James Myers, that’s digging up dirt on Mr. Davis (like a dropped domestic violence case and a DUI). He then moves to seal his records after the fox is out of the hen house. The city commission and mayor start getting very defensive and start violating sunshine laws, deleting public comments on Facebook and denying citizens the right to speak at meetings.

Unfortunately, Facebook pages aren’t open and available to everyone. It’s not quite the same as this blog, which has been exposing corruption and the Monarchy of Montgomery County since 2005. 2970 posts so far, 23,705 comments, making this site more yours than mine.

The sad reality is, Ohio places itself at a handicap by allowing tiny little governments like Moraine, population 6000, have a government that existed solely by the benefit of the old GM truck plant and now Fuyao. There is no reason for a city manager, a council, a police chief, a fire department, and all the overhead that go with it- for a podunk burg in the middle of much larger, well run cities. And, that’s where Reconstructing Dayton comes in. We watched as “One Dayton” spent a ton of time devising some new sort of geo-political system to manage a “unigov” for Montgomery County only to be met with insane resistance- mostly lead by the powers in charge now.

Instead of coming up with the new model, all we’re going to focus on is the ridiculous costs being thrust upon the taxpayers to support the Monarchy and their many banana republics. We’re going to work on identifying which candidates support reduction in governmental overhead, increased transparency and simplification savings for our county. We’re going to ask the stupid questions- like, if we can redraw precincts and state rep districts and congressional districts, why can’t we re-draw county lines? Wouldn’t it be easier to bring Fairborn, Beavercreek, Springboro and Bellbrook into Montgomery County- which could be mostly urban, and leave the rural farmland to a rural focused county?

To do this, our 501(c)(4) has hired a full-time writer/researcher to start digging in and developing resources to further our dreams of a simplified governmental structure, tax base and public face to a global economy. I don’t care if you were born and bred in Oakwood, Washington Township, or Miamisburg, to the rest of the world you’re from Dayton and it’s about time we stop pretending we’re not capable of competing for jobs with Atlanta where NCR went, or the Research Triangle where Lexis Nexis went, or Cincinnati where Iams went, etc.

Our new writer is Alexander Sharp. His brief bio: “Alexander Sharp is a researcher and writer for The Next Wave in Dayton, Ohio. He received a B.A. in English (literature) from Wittenberg University and an M.A. in English (rhetoric & composition) from the University of Dayton.” He can be reached at sharp@reconstructingdayton.org

His first post, Efforts for Campaign Finance Transparency Long Overdue  is now up. It’s our reaction to the housebill that’s being proposed to help eliminate the “dark money” that got Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder indicted and removed from office.

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Categories: Local Politics