When I pulled into the park­ing lot at City Hall and noticed the per­son­al­ized license plate of my neigh­bor, Harpy, (in Greek Mythol­ogy the harpy was a winged death-spirit), I knew this was going to be a con­tentious meet­ing. True to form the ‘harpy’ lived up to her name­sake and cast a pall over the entire proceedings.

Before elab­o­rat­ing on that it should be noted that the coun­cil addressed the mat­ter of the seat vacated by Kathy Hagen and attempted to clar­ify nomen­cla­ture used to define the process under which Dian Cour­tright was pre­sumed to be given a seat on the coun­cil. The rub was in the use of a gen­eral term of meet­ing rather than using the term “polling” of the mem­bers. So, as I have stated before there is a lot of hair split­ting, to what end, I don’t know but a cou­ple of embit­tered sound­ing cit­i­zens do not want to let it go.

While a city coun­cil meet­ing was hardly the appro­pri­ate place to bring up such a mat­ter, the harpy, appar­ently des­per­ate for a pub­lic venue, demanded that the mayor tell her which local media to believe. Prob­a­bly, the mayor should have just advised her that it was not within the purview of the coun­cil to make jour­nal­is­tic judg­ments on her behalf.

The harpy then quoted a com­ment from this blog

As for the ex reporter, his base is erod­ing as the old guard falls by the way­side. Had he done his job and actu­ally informed the pub­lic instead of ped­dling what­ever line his heroes wanted him to, he might still have a job. Had he behaved like a jour­nal­ist instead of a groupie the city might have been spared tens of thou­sands of dol­lars in set­tle­ment claims.

Well I stand by that com­ment 100%… in my opin­ion the reporter in ques­tion should have inves­ti­gated the many claims of police mis­con­duct instead of car­ry­ing water for the city man­ager and the for­mer police chief. Had he done what news­pa­pers are sup­posed to do, advise the pub­lic that peo­ple were afraid of the police offi­cers and not because they were law­break­ers, Reaves might have been gone sooner and tort claims and labor griev­ances filed and paid may not have been incurred.

There is an old phrase, ‘birds of a feather flock together’ and it is inter­est­ing that the for­mer reporter’s best fan is the harpy. While she went to some lengths to defend the reporter it was clear that her only pur­pose in attend­ing was to set­tle a score with The Sen­tinel by attempt­ing to humil­i­ate the paper in pub­lic. She accused the paper of pub­lish­ing lies about her writ­ten by me, which is pretty rich given the count­less lies she has told about me AND my ten year old daughter.

The arti­cle she is prob­a­bly refer­ring to relates to my objec­tion to pro­vid­ing DA Paul Frasier with addi­tional funds via Mea­sure 62 to run his office, in which I use my own per­sonal expe­ri­ences, truth­fully, to illus­trate my point. The really funny thing is that few peo­ple would even know she and I are neigh­bors were it not for her obses­sive need to announce the fact to any­one will­ing to listen.

This is not the first time this woman has mis­used a city coun­cil meet­ing. More than a year ago she slan­dered me at a city coun­cil meet­ing, when I was not in atten­dance, for fif­teen min­utes even claim­ing I had a crim­i­nal record and had been on pro­ba­tion. Why the coun­cil allows the type of thing that went on then and again tonight is beyond me… the woman is rude and out of line. Her venom has no place in a pub­lic forum per­tain­ing to city mat­ters. My per­sonal opin­ion is that she has demon­strated her men­tal insta­bil­ity well enough and pub­licly enough that the police should have her eval­u­ated by DHS as a dan­ger to her­self and others.

Fur­ther, the mayor dis­cussed whether blog­gers should be con­sid­ered media and there­fore be allowed to attend exec­u­tive ses­sions. Many cities are attempt­ing to define ‘media’ and there have been sev­eral bat­tles over the mat­ter in Ore­gon.

Mark Bun­ster started an unex­pected con­tro­versy three months ago that now has legal and media experts across the state scrambling.

As the author of polit­i­cal blog Loaded Ory­gun, Bun­ster insisted at a Lake Oswego City Coun­cil meet­ing that he was a mem­ber of the news media and there­fore, under Ore­gon statute, allowed to sit in on exec­u­tive ses­sion meetings.

Lack­ing a clear pol­icy on the issue, Lake Oswego city coun­cilors asked Bun­ster to leave.

Appar­ently sen­si­tive to the mat­ter a local blog­ger and erst­while reporter for The Sen­tinel inter­rupted the mayor and ‘jump’ed in to quote the 1st Amend­ment and assert his rights to attend exec­u­tive ses­sions. Mean­while the nor­mally tac­i­turn city attor­ney spoke for the sec­ond time that night and seemed pre­dis­posed to accept one blog but was less sure about accept­ing ALL blogs as ‘media’ (could he mean me?)

It was a big night for city attor­ney John Trew who was also asked to give his opin­ion regard­ing the seat vacated by Kathy Hagen and seems to be of the opin­ion that appli­ca­tions for the posi­tion com­plete with inter­views before the coun­cil should be the man­ner in which the seat is filled. My under­stand­ing is that Coos Bay had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence a while back and opted for that route rather than tak­ing the next high­est vote get­ter and all hell broke loose.

Prob­a­bly they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t at least if the dynamic duo men­tioned above are suc­cess­ful in their quest to rile up the masses.