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A petulant attitude combined with technological ignorance

By Scott Tibbs, October 5, 2018

I sent the following press release last Friday, as part of my campaign for Perry Township Board:

When I called for expanded transparency back in July, the most recent meeting minutes on the Perry Township website were dated February 16, 2017. I am pleased that Perry Township has taken my advice and posted meeting minutes for the last year and a half. There is even an announcement for the adoption of the budget. Even as a candidate, it appears I am getting results for the taxpayers of Perry Township. It is not enough to abide by the bare minimum legal standard. Township government should go above and beyond to be as transparent as possible. In the Information Age, that means putting things online.

With that said, the petulant attitude and technological ignorance of the Perry Township trustee is unfortunate. The Democratic incumbent suggested that I am calling for "another fulltime position as a web producer." This is utterly absurd, and a dishonest representation of what I was suggesting. It takes virtually no time and not one penny of tax money to put meeting agendas online. At the most, this would take ten minutes once a month. To claim this would require another staff member is absurd. I have personally done things like that for years.

In the time it takes for the Trustee to write an angry rant in HeraldTimesOnline.com comments, he could have used a free PDF printer program such as CutePDF to "print" an agenda, convert it to an image with a number of free tools you can find online, and posted it to social media and/or the Perry Township website.

Furthermore, meeting times are at 4:30 pm, which is during the typical 8 to 5 work day. It is unreasonable to expect people take time off work to attend. The city council meets in the evenings, and the county council has moved meetings to later to allow the public to attend. There is no reason the township board cannot do the same thing.

That the incumbent Democratic trustee felt it necessary to launch a vicious and totally false personal attack against me in HTO comments demonstrates, once again, an entitlement mentality. This unprovoked nasty personal attack over differences in public policy is far below what we should expect of our elected officials. If the incumbent Democratic trustee is so immature and unprofessional that he cannot handle criticism, he should resign from office. Democrats have had one-party rule for over twenty years in township government, and that mentality needs to change. The only way to change that is by electing Republicans.