“I would appreciate it if you could make a PowerPoint for me.”
– County Commissioner Al French, at last week’s county board meeting
If you thought the departure of Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich meant the end of vengeful, score-setting slideshows in county government, think again.
Al French Commissioner is rebooting.
French, who appeared to lament loudly the erosion of his authority under the new five-member council, uncorked a slide show at the last county council meeting – and accompanied it with a lengthy, detailed look at the airport. , confusing and trivial detailing board politics, he dragged former airport board chair and current county board chair Mary Cooney through the mud.
In the end, it’s hard to say what’s the big deal about French’s idea – Kuney asks about some language that was changed in the resolution, superimposed on top of some old hate. You might suspect that he is trying to bore the other committee members to death.
The real cause of displeasure appears to have been Kuney’s audacity to bring up a potential candidate for the airport committee, when French, as the committee’s representative to the airport committee, already had a candidate in mind.
courage!
You can already see: this new era is going to be very difficult for the French.
Bulldozers are not going to work.
You get the sense that the French got this right from the start — speaking out in 2018 against Rep. Marcus Richelli’s proposal to expand the committee from three county-wide votes to five district-by-region. member’s proposal. The previous system all but guaranteed Republican pace commissions; the new lineup retains a 3-2 Republican majority that does a better job of reflecting county populations and representing entire communities.
French won re-election in the first election in the regional system, but the first month of the new regime has been difficult for a leader known – especially but not exclusively by his political opponents – as a bully. A soberist, a man with an almost royal sense of his own authority.
A 2014 profile of the French inlander, detailing his history of conflict from city council to county commission, was titled “Bulldozer.” It included praise for his ability to get the job done, as well as some of the harshest criticism you’ll ever see in local politics. Former city council president Joe Shogan called him “the worst person I’ve ever met”.
For all intents and purposes, bulldozers have pushed the county board’s agenda for years. Even when he’s not holding the chairman’s gavel, you can feel him holding the reins.
Well, the reins had been taken from him, and he didn’t like it at all. One of the first decisions to be made on a new committee is to choose a chair. Two of the board’s new Democrats, Amber Waldref and Chris Jordan, voted alongside Kuney for the role — drawing the ire of French and Josh Kerns.
“She’s on the side of the Democrats,” French said. Kerns complained that Kuney missed or attended too many meetings. Both claimed absurdly that Cooney ushered in a new Democratic majority.
If that’s a stretch, though, it’s not hard to imagine a new coalition could emerge in France’s scorched earth. Because what you see in the contempt for Cooney is the strategic dead end of bulldozer politics.
After all, when you try to crush someone, you either get your way or you make an enemy.
Make enemies big enough, and soon they’ll join forces with your other enemies.
French didn’t have to worry so much before, but now he does. His slides and half-hour lament about the airport board — on a seemingly trivial matter — were stark reminders of Knezovich’s growing use of PowerPoint in his final years in office.
These public displays of the sheriff — in public forums, in YouTube videos, at press conferences — are marked by his thin-skinned frustration with anyone who doesn’t see things through Ozzie’s lens. He tries to bully citizens, critics, activists, Democratic politicians, journalists, judges, legislators…
PowerPoint has always been an odd element of this authoritarian stagecraft, because PowerPoint is the weapon of extreme dullness, the hallmark of lethargic conference presentations and boring lectures. It might seem odd to deploy them to quell dissent, silence critics, and prove you’re impeccably right about everything.
But the slides themselves aren’t really the issue, what matters is the spirit of these presentations – the spirit of a person speaking exist people, no and them.
That ethos seems unlikely to apply to a five-person board. That doesn’t mean Bulldozer won’t keep trying.
