Jeff Wise and David Jeffrey are making strong and independent showings for why their reelection in 2012 might be a good thing. A bloc of four votes, Look, Elvig, Mayor Ramsey, and McGlone have been the four-vote majority in the 4-3 splits I am aware of, involving Landform, and this electrical inspector situation.
Online Ramsey minutes go back to the the 1970's and agendas back to the 1980's and a search of them for "Hagfor" the long-term inspector the city used, shows no complaints about him at all, from the 1970's until this year, this council, this 4-3 split situation. There were two letters about moving the inspections in-house, in 2009, and in full agendas "Hagfor" showed up as a copy recipient of each letter. That's the record. Objective fact. Decades without problems or incidents of record.
Well, now this is very interesting, Sept. 2009, Matt Look documented as positive in attitude about Ted Hagfor, his performance, his Gestalt.
Crystal clear. On the record.
What do you presume may have changed in the interim, with four on council, Look included, aligned against keeping Hagfor in the loop?
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One holds public office, in my view, to serve the public interest and not to advance any personally motivated agenda. I bet Ted Hagfor would agree.
For the ABC Newspapers report on the latest 4-3 split vote, this link, stating in relevant part:
The council decided to hire Tokle on a 4-3 vote. Councilmembers John Dehen, David Jeffrey and Jeff Wise voted no because of procedure concerns.
One of the other candidates would have brought more money into the city, Wise said.
But some councilmembers had some [quite recent 2010] customer services issues with him [Ted Hagfor] so his name is nowhere on the list, even though his performance could be monitored, he said. [unclear pronoun referent - probably "he" = Wise - with the "him" and "he" in the sentence not intended as parallel]
The city staff accepted additional bids on the requests for proposals (RFP) and that “procedure bugs me,” said Dehen.
Staff should have consulted the council before doing that, he said.
When the city sent out RFP, it received only two proposals, said Nelson.
One was from the city of Coon Rapids, which would have required Ramsey to commit a staff member, and the other was from an electrical inspector [Ted Hagfor] that some members of council have customer service concerns with, she said.
Knowing the council did not want to commit a staff member and considering the comments about the electrical inspector, staff decided go out for additional proposals, Nelson said.
[bracketing added] It seems spineless to not even mention Ted Hagfor by name, so that people would have to infer who it was that crossed paths with someone on council in an adversarial way and then made the "other" list by doing the job as Hagfor did the job.
We are a government of laws, not of men. I know it's so, I did a Google. Wikipedia even says so, or discusses the concept.