My Take: Let's focus on healing in a post Ottawa Impact county
I started attending the meetings of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners just before I knew things were going to blow up in front of my face.
I thought I was just going to watch a boring segment of government do its business. John Shay was still the deputy administrator and the plastic dividers were still up between the county commissioners' seats at their meetings to protect them from infecting each other with COVID-19. The crazy anti-maskers were still relatively few and far between, although they did regularly outnumber me. Over time, we built up a group to oppose them through the Facebook group “The Smart Science Alliance of Ottawa County,” which became an affiliate of MiPASS, but not fast enough and not enough to save many commissioners.
Al Vanderberg was the administrator of Ottawa County. He hired John Shay, who became the next county administrator; Robin Afrik, who ran the DEI office; Lisa Stefanovsky, who was the previous Public Health officer and probably most of the people we now think of as the heroes of the staff of Ottawa County and the Department of Public Health. Vanderberg is now the administrator of Kent County and, if and when we restore sanity to the management of Ottawa County, we might lean on him or some of the people he knows to help us restore our county to some level of professional management.
On March 25, I tried to use his personal milestone to point out what we are aiming to restore: professional management. Ottawa Impact has been nowhere near that. Politics should be the tiny little currents that pull on the heavy weight of government, which should be anchored in professional management.
Since Ottawa Impact has been in control, we have been experiencing a county buffeted around in a political storm, untethered from any anchor but the whims of a group of ignorant, arrogant, immature, political extremists. I say we have had enough. I see where we are coming from and where we should be going. If you long for a county to be well run again, now must be the beginning of a long season to begin to make it happen. Many have started and should be applauded, but if you haven’t yet, the time is coming fast.
I used his birthday to try to rally the troops and to bring out those who might remember the days of good management. It was my way of uniting the old and new wings of a coalition around the one thing we should want, to restore professional management as the central core of what we seek for Ottawa County.
It’s time to push all of the theatrical “performance art politics” and “religious and sexuality politics” back off the public stage in Ottawa County. Religion and sexuality should not be a battleground and it’s Ottawa Impact and the right-wing fanatics who have brought state-level politics to county-level government and we have had enough of your nonsense. To our opposition, stop literally demonizing us — it is just un-American. We are not globalists or communists, not groomers or followers of George Soros. Just stop your stupid lies and deal with us as we truly are, your neighbors with a different opinion.
There are those who can’t be seen as political and who just want to celebrate the common decency of good government, and those who are primarily political who should know that when our anchor is reset we can cautiously put our politics aside while not letting our attention stray again. Both should wish Al a Happy Birthday. We all need to know the end state as we are starting, where we are going to stop.
It’s time to heal the divisions in Ottawa County, not exploit them. Joe Moss wants to lock Ottawa County down for the conservatives to call their own. I demand that we make it a place that reacts to the people who live here and changes along with the changes in the people as they see fit over time.
You can’t take my county and call it all yours, Joe Moss. You have to share or you have to get out.
— David Barnosky resides in West Olive.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: My Take: Let's focus on healing in a post Ottawa Impact county
