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I get tired of all the press that the Village seems to get that is so biased it almost seems like someone pays the papers to print these articles kind of like they would an advertisement. The latest one in the Clermont Sun, April 9th, really got to me. It talks about "Town Hall Meetings" and then goes on to describe meetings that as far as I am concerned have no resembalance to "Town Hall Meetings". The only Town Hall Meetings I have ever seen were the New England town hall meetings that I have seen in TV. These would be what I would think we should have here in Amelia but as usual the public has no real say, just political positioning from the Administration which is exactly what they are doing with the support of the newspapers! Well I thought I would try to get the truth out by submitting my own story to the press at Cincinnati.Com. Here is what I submitted: Contributed by John Toren Wednesday, April 15, 2009 My name is John M Toren. My family and I are 44 years residents of Amelia. I am working as hard as anyone to dissolve this Village. I just saw the front page article about Amelia scheduling town hall meetings that appeared in the April 9th, 2009 edition of the Clermont Sun. Let me express my opinion of what a town hall meeting should be and I take this right from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “A town hall meeting is an informal public meeting derived from the traditional town meetings of New England. Similarly to those meetings, everybody in a community is invited to attend, voice their opinions, and hear the responses from public figures and elected officials, although attendees rarely vote on an issue. In today's heterogeneous communities with large populations, more often, town hall meetings are held so that people can influence elected officials in their decision making or to give them a chance to feel that their voices are being heard. There are no specific rules or guidelines for holding a town hall meeting. If the turnout is large, and the objective is to give as many people as possible an opportunity to speak, the group can be broken down into smaller discussion groups. Participants all hear an opening presentation and then group-up to discuss an aspect of the presentation. Each group appoints someone to summarize their group's discussion.” So I really don’t look upon these meetings as “town hall meetings” at all. I would call them “Ellington’s political positioning meetings” if anything. If you look at the agenda it is perfectly clear that these meetings are an effort to try to have all the Administration show their faces to the cameras and tell us all how good they are and how badly they are needed. Most, if not all, of Amelia residents already know all these people and what they are all about. That’s why we were able to gather so many signatures. Let’s look at the agenda of the first meeting. It includes a PowerPoint presentation and introduction of the village officials, police and administrative staff members. Then a short presentation by the chief of police, and a presentation by a representative of the Union Township Fire Department. Then we get the chairman of the Recreation Committee and the chair of Amelia Senior Support Commission. Are we having any discussions about the issues? NO! What we are seeing is political positioning that Ellington masters in. I also see that there will be a representative from the Union Township Fire Department present. Well we hear from them almost every council meeting. They tell us they had so many runs last month and everything is fine. Well it’s not fine. For all the years they have operated Station 52 which was supposed to be the primary service station staffed by 4 personnel they have not met their contractual obligation. They have breached their contract by staffing less than 3 for the whole of 2008 and 2.6 for the last half! Recently their levy to try to get even more money failed. They are saying that as many as 25 fireman and policeman will be laid off. Their staffing is going down not up. What will happen when they lose more Fire Department people? Everything is not fine but they will tell you “all is well”. Not only that but there are more issues with their contract. The contract states that their proposal is the lowest and best. I do not believe that! The Village in the threatening letter sent on August 11th, 2008 stated that we would owe a debt of $330,000.00 a year plus 4% per year for 7 more years if we dissolved the village. First of all that’s is not what the contract says at all so it is NOT TRUE! Second It was not stated as an opinion it was stated as a fact. That is not true either! There are other legal opinions that could render this debt to zero! No one really knows exactly what will take place. The ORC 730.21 does not clearly state what debt consists of. It says “vested rights or accrued liabilities”. So what are these things? I have heard opinions that accrued liabilities in cases like service contracts could possibly mean services performed and that future services do not count! Does that mean we will not have this debt! NO! But it does not mean we will have either. And to state it as factual is simply a falsehood! Then it lastly says “Time will be allotted for public input at the end of the meeting.” It does not say how much public input time there will be does it? This is nothing like a town hall meeting it is more like a council meeting! Public input at their normal meetings is worthless because they do not record it in any detail and totally ignore some of the most important issues brought to their attention. I recently spent over twenty minutes debating with the village solicitor about the $600,000 debt and it was not even mentioned! Their public input is worthless! We have been discussing and debating a lot of issues for about a year now and on the important issues we get nothing! When I got involved last August and they threatened us with a bunch of falsehoods and deceptions I started a website I called saveamelia.org. If you want to see the character of the people the newspapers seem to be supporting with all their articles just go to this website and look for yourself! You can also go to dissolveamelia.org to view what these people are from a different perspective. I do not belong to any organization.! I am doing this on my own! It has cost hundreds of dollars, and thousands of hours of research time and hundreds of hours of programming the web pages you should look at if you are interested in the truth of it. This work cannot be examined in a few short minutes at the end of what will be a very boring meeting. It simply isn’t possible and Ellington knows it! An example of this is the $600,000 debt they stated that we owed Rumpke in the threat letter of August 11th, 2008. This is April and I still have no answer! Almost 8 months! What good would it do to ask this question again. One of the so-called town meetings” being referred to seems to be moderated by Mr. Dan Hurley of channel 12 News. It is called a forum. I call it a setup. If you ask Ellington any question that cannot be handled by his usual boiler plate response he forwards it to the Village Solicitor. I have seen this dozens of times in email questions to Ellington and in many town meetings. All he wants to do here is to have a new boiler plate answer to what ever question Dissolve Amelia Now might want to ask so he doesn’t appear not to know the answers which most of the time is the case. And frankly I wouldn’t even care to know what questions he wants to ask because he already knows them all from our websites! My advice to Dissolve Amelia Now is simply to stay on course. These last minutes political positioning efforts by the administration are not going to change a single mind in Amelia. We should not waste our time listening to them “preach to the choir” because that is all this is and the people of Amelia are smart enough to see through it. John M Toren I got exactly what I expected, a rejection. Now they don't bother to tell you why they just say "rejected" in one of their little boxes and that's it. So as far as I am concerned the press is about as worthless as Ellington's ridiculous Town Hall Meetings. What we need to do is get rid of both these problems by voting YES on issue 1 on May 5th. No more Village, no more Ellington, no more Cincinnati.Com articles! __________________ |
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