The NJ picks up on our question about the NAACP bullying Councilwoman Lisa Diller and writes about the War on Women that Councilwoman Diller believes is being waged by Tom Gordon on the women in NCCo County Council. This is a good article by Adam Taylor, that adds some interesting history of NCCo folks flying off of the handle:
In January, county Pension Board member Dace Blaskovitz wrote Gordon and asked for an apology for Grimaldi’s “rude and unprofessional” conduct at a board meeting. Grimaldi apologized via email three days later.
In 2011, Street screamed at county Auditor Bob Wasserbach. Earlier this year, Smiley yelled at Grimaldi. Also this year, Hollins and Councilman Bob Weiner – ages 71 and 63, respectively – cursed at each other in a council hallway and talked about going to the garage to fight it out.
Diller yelled at no one in particular during a 2011 council meeting when she was frustrated about the financial condition of the county’s PAL Centers. In 2012, she raised her voice at Kim Hoffman, a white land-use attorney.
“We have some civility issues on the council,” Bullock said. “That’s how we handle our business sometimes.”
Smith and Nichols said the NAACP hasn’t received the meeting it requested to discuss the Diller-Pepukayi incident. Bullock said that meeting could take place soon, and he encouraged Diller to apologize to Pepukayi.
We’re all human, and flying off the handle at friends, family, co-workers for reasons real and not is something we have all done. NCCo Councilpeople are just as human and are routinely engaged in intense deliberations with pretty high stakes. Someone with more than one incident of yelling at people in Council is Councilman Jea Street:
(This one is from a few weeks ago, when Street lit into Penrose Hollins.)
(These two are from a couple of years back — when the PAL centers were being audited and Street was unhappy with the analysis that the centers just didn’t have the fiscal discipline that they should have. In an ironic twist, David Grimaldi joined the PAL Centers board and helped them fix a bunch of their fiscal problems.)
There’s also audio I am trying to put my hands on of Mr. Street screaming at NCCo staff person Carrie Sawyer Casey to where she had to run from the room.
And seriously — it isn’t so important that he is yelling at people (even though he is famously short-tempered), because for all I know he could have apologized profusely and bought these folks drinks afterwards. But if Jea Street (whose public style is Get Mad First) is calling Councilwoman Diller’s behavior Outrageous, one wonders whether the NAACP has been pushing for Street himself to take Anger Management and Diversity Training courses, or even threatening to watch his behavior so their members can do whatever. Because Mr. Street is a serial offender in the temper department and I can’t find campaigns to try demand apologies, cut him out of information loops, to spin up public pressure to force him into some submission.
But this isn’t about Jea Street. This is about the Boy’s Club Rules. And in the NCCo Boy’s Club, it is well within bounds for Councilman Jea Street and the rest get to show anger, be rude and disprespectful — but Councilwoman Diller is supposed to show shut up and know her place. David Grimadi runs around hitting and shoving people without having to publicly apologize or be subject to NAACP intimidation tactics, and other NCCo Councilpeople have also raised their voices when the going got tough, but the only person being targeted is Lisa Diller. This is also about the atmosphere that Council President Chris Bullock allows to persist. Because think about it — if Bullock had been in the lead in helping Councilwoman Kilpatrick to get her (rightful) briefing, none of the rest of this would have happened. And why Council President Bullock doesn’t think it is important to stand up for the rights of his branch of government is beyond me.
This also looks like the Boy’s Club Rules have invoked a bump in the road for the Pike Creek lawsuit that Councilwoman Kirkpatrick wanted the briefing for:
Pepukayi’s reasoning for not engaging in a legal strategy session with council – which prompted Diller’s anger in the first place – could impact the Pike Creek lawsuit. Pepukayi said the county, not the council, was his client in the case, and that’s why he said he couldn’t discuss legal strategy with council members. Those comments led the developers that want to build houses on the golf course to file a brief questioning Pepukayi’s argument that the council is not represented in the case. County attorneys responded in a brief saying the developer’s new filing is frivolous.
So Pepukayi’s argument to the Finance Committee (the one effectively disposed of by Diller, Kirkpatrick and Council Lawyer Dulin) that Council is not party to this lawsuit is now being used against him by the developer’s in this lawsuit. The filing claiming that this position is frivolous is admission that Pepukayi’s mansplaining to these ladies was, in fact, stupid mansplaining and they want the court to disregard that.
Lastly, this also looks like the Gordon Administration trying to isolate some parts of the NCCo Council who hang together (in the main) on some budget issues (especially forcing changes to this year’s budget) — including Cartier, Diller, Hollins, Kilpatrick, and Smiley. The two that have been targets so far are Diller and Kilpatrick — the women in the group.
I think that it is right that both Kilpatrick and Diller have constituencies that include a great many professional women — women who intuitively get the kind of targeting being done here and who are pretty unhappy seeing this happen in NCCo. So you wonder what it is that the Gordon folks think they are getting by trying to intimidate these two. Who clearly aren’t having any of it.