Total Recall

I have been doing a fair amount of reading lately, but it hasn’t been stuff that I really wanted to be spending my time on. At the moment, I can look around my desk and see, besides the mess and clutter, a stack of papers with the words "Statutory Duties of the Board of Commissioners" on it. At the top of the column of documents I’ve saved to my Word program there is the fairly straight forward title: Section 33- Recall of Elective Officials.doc. There were the pages and pages yesterday of the minutes of Vashon Park District (VPD) board meetings over the past year where the public comment period notes got longer and more heated as the year progressed. There is the web page a few clicks away titled VES Master Plan with its pictures of worn but certainly serviceable baseball and soccer fields that have since been torn up and plowed under to make way for the current expanses of extra premium turf green and section after section of rented chain link fence that are joined together into a great pen as if to keep it all from running away. Further down on that page there are two pictures of the Old Gym- one a shot from the historical archives of Vashon High School student acrobats on ropes and bars inside the old wooden space, and the other photo a more contemporary shot of the outside of the building with a large, orange/red question mark attached to the front of it, giving the appearance of some friendly old dog, sitting and tilting its head in a last quizzical attempt at understanding the meaning of the shotgun pointed at its head.
 
One can, of course, choose to ‘engrave your name in History!’ while visiting the VPD welcome page: http://www.vashonparkdistrict.org/section_home/index.htm- or pick one of three options for donating $25, $50, or $100 instead of the $150 or $225 options to have a variety of characters, logos or drawings cast into pavers for posterity. As it is though, as with many things involved with the VPD these days, it is unclear where this money might go, as the site directs potential donors to make a check out to the Vashon Park District, and as we have seen in a number of the meetings as of late, there seems to be some confusion there as to where monies have gone and why they may have gone there. One of the things that I was reminded of while wandering the pages of past Board of Commissioners meeting minutes is the fact that someone did decide to check on where VPD monies have been and gone- that would be the state auditors. While cruising down VPD Board meeting memory lane, I was reminded that back in the beginning of October of 2012, the bean counters from wa.gov got the numbers from our Parks Department- as of yet we have not heard of any results. Some people, like a few key people on the Board of Commissioners, seem to believe that no news is good news. Whilst I was lurking just beyond (don’t want to get too close to that stuff) the excellent boxed wine selection at our local food emporium and walkabout social networking site, I happened upon an acquaintance who is also a lawyer, and without asking he volunteered that he agreed with my last assessment of the Parks situation printed here. He also said that having himself been breezed through a state audit in a week, it would seem highly unlikely that the audit news, which is still forthcoming as of this writing, would be anything recognized as good. But who knows?
 
Which brings us back to my piles of paper with words on them. There is the one that starts with "All Four Parks Commissioners Should Resign.doc", and is a letter found elsewhere that reflects sentiments voiced here before. As only one of the original Commissioners present during the heightening of this debacle has chosen to absent himself from the Board, we should perhaps look at (apologies to election night with Megyn Kelly on Fox News) the math those who remain do to make themselves feel good as VPD Commissioners. We have most recently heard of the hardship caused VPD by the $10K in charges for the audit by the state. We have heard about the monetary hardship brought on by the legal actions involving Parks and the Rosser Family, even though it was Parks that initiated this particular legal tussle. We have heard that it is indeed the Parks’ accounting software that is the source of all their woes. We have heard that the recession was to blame. And we have heard that it was the Big Surprise of the loss of property tax levy revenues that sent the Board into a cost cutting, job slashing ballet on the rocks, and then, after all that we are assured that nothing has changed there.
 
The VPD Board of Commissioners can do us all a favor and save us more wasted time and money by stepping aside on their own so new people with a fresh and untainted view of this situation might come in to salvage what is left. They also need to leave before naming the next head of Parks. If they don’t, then there’s always this stack of papers over here with the Recall of Elective Officials words on it. There are a couple of troublesome words here as well, and they would be misfeasance and/or malfeasance. When the recall review board is determining what is or is not a recall-able action one runs into how a given person/judge might interpret them- the interpretation of the word malfeasance, like Bill Clinton’s "is", is a matter of subjective determination. But then there is this: " ‘violation of oath of office’ means neglect or knowing failure by an elective public officer to perform faithfully a duty imposed by law." In the other paper pile mentioned above relating to duties we find this: "…Expenditures shall be made solely in accordance with the budget and should revenues accrue at a rate below the anticipated amounts, the board of park and recreation commissioners shall reduce expenditures accordingly." As for the oath, it says something about faithfully and impartially performing the duties of Commissioner as prescribed by law. When the audit comes in we will hopefully know a lot more about all this, but it seems we know enough already.