No retaliation? Right

To the Editor:

To my fellow Fairmont citizens: After watching Monday’s City Council meeting, I have put my finger on what our problem is at City Hall. Three council members — Tom Hawkins, Randy Lubenow and Ruth Cyphers — are not in their right minds.

How do I know this, you ask? Can anyone in Fairmont read the following statement and then not wet themselves laughing? “She (Soldo) believes, which I don’t agree with her, that employees could be retaliated against, but I don’t expect anybody on this council would ever retaliate against somebody,” Hawkins said.

According to the Sentinel report: “Lubenow questioned the validity of the witnesses being concerned about retaliation. ‘Why, if they’re doing their job and they knew nothing about the City Attorney’s job performance, why would they be worried?'”

OK, bathroom break.

By the way, we taxpayers paid $10,500 so these three could find out that four city employees they wanted interrogated did not know one blessed thing. Not happy, Lubenow made a motion Monday and Cyphers seconded to ask for the investigator’s transcripts. That motion passed with the triad voting in favor and the other two council members — Peters and Hasek — voting against.

Yes, I am afraid the triad wants confidential information from what these employees said, and who said what. It would take an idiot not to know that revenge and retaliation are next in order. After all, these three have a record of rolling heads and running up our city’s costs in their wake.

The greatest example of revenge, retaliation and running up costs, and to heck with the consequences, is what the triad did next. They changed the “official city newspaper” from the Sentinel to the Photo Press. While I love the weekly paper and read it every week cover to cover, it costs more for the city to publish notices in the Photo Press than it does the Sentinel.

More importantly, the weekly deadline for insertion into the Wednesday Photo Press is noon Monday. So anything that needs to be published after a Monday evening meeting of the City Council must wait until not the following Wednesday but until the next Wednesday (10 days) before it will be officially published. With the Sentinel, it is published in a matter of a couple days. When matters that must be officially published take extra time to accomplish, or the matter is addressed before the required waiting period because of the delay, that is going to cost us taxpayers.

Jack H. Hansen

Fairmont