Tuesday April 1 thru Thursday April 3 and Monday April 7 & Tuesday April 8 were the FY2015 Budget Input Discussions and were billed to General Tribal Council as ‘Your Opportunity to Provide Input.’
For some reason Brenda John-Stevens led the discussions and, as the following videos of the April 2, 2014 meeting demonstrate, did so in her typical air headed, brown-nosing, prissy manner.
Brenda laid out the ground rules as follows:
- Listen with respect.
- No interruptions while another is speaking.
- Hold your questions and input for the Q & A panel.
- One conversation at a time.
- This is not a debate so keep it on the topic, not on people.
- One question per person, and then a follow-up question.
- Silence cell phones.
You can watch Brenda go over the rules here if you can stomach it:
At one point Rae Skenandore asked two questions (naughty, naughty!), one about the current Division of Land Management spending freeze due to an ongoing internal audit and another question in regard to the personnel structure of the Division of Land Management and the Environmental, Health & Safety Division, both of which Pat Pelky is currently acting as the Director for.
Pat Pelky responded by saying that he had in fact been asked by the current Business Committee to make recommendations on how those two divisions, as well as the Housing Area, could be brought into a more unified “alignment” and to work on “pulling the three divisions together” in order to save money.
Oneida Eye Publisher Leah Sue Dodge, abiding by the ground rules of only providing input that is on topic, made the observation that, while cognizant of the current Treasurer’s comments that the Tribe is going into FY2015 with a $30 million deficit, she has concerns about how bringing those three divisions too closely together could be detrimental in that the organization might lose the necessary objectivity and healthy adversarial discourse that is sometimes required in order to have a fully-informed set of varying opinions as well as important checks and balances among different departments.
Leah then cited the clear and undeniable ongoing problems with the Oneida Tribal Cemetery as an obvious example of a situation in which the Tribe would have benefited from having more diverse discussion, debate, and even disagreement among the directors of different divisions before the costly decision to put the cemetery in an inappropriate location was made, and she therefore encouraged the Q & A panel to find a different location as soon as possible and figure out a respectful way to make the transition.
Pat Pelky thanked Leah for her questions (even though she had really only responded to Pat Pelky’s answer to a previous question and hadn’t so much asked a question as given input that, based on her direct observations, the cemetery’s new French tile drain system wasn’t doing what it was supposed to accomplish and therefore the transition to another location needed to be budgeted).
Pat Pelky addressed the cemetery issue by saying that they were looking at a secondary site and then broached a topic that Dodge hadn’t asked about, namely the inter-departmental attempt by the Environmental, Health & Safety Division to have greater internal checks & balances by having a division between staff that carried out projects versus staff that did testing and regulatory oversight of the impacts of the implementations of community directives.
Pat Cornelius also addressed Leah’s input and recommendation by confirming that previously examined sites for the cemetery are being looked at again and saying that departments need to work together, which isn’t anything Dodge opposed but rather suggested that sometimes ‘working together’ means facilitating objectivity and even objections rather than over-consolidation.
Leah Sue Dodge was then exercising her right to ask a follow-up question when Brenda John-Stevens attempted to jump down her throat by falsely claiming that Leah had already asked two questions and that Leah was somehow being “disrespectful” and not obeying the ground rules.
In reality, Brenda broke her own ground rules by refusing to listen with respect and instead rudely interrupting Leah Dodge while she was speaking to the topics at hand.
Predictably, Brenda John-Stevens wound up in a spittoon after Leah refused to be cowed by a ridiculous, vacuous hypocrite.
Then, in a sad and pathetic attempt to be snide to Dodge, Brenda John-Stevens thanked the next questioner, Julie Barton, for her patience.
Julie Barton proceeded to do just the same – and fully appropriate – thing that Leah Dodge had done: prefaced her topical question with an observation about something related (in Julie’s case the Tribe’s 2020 Plan), listened patiently to the response of the Q & A panel, and then asked a follow-up question.
In fact, Julie Barton’s multi-faceted question about the Scott Walker-funding Koch brothers‘ sludge lagoon next to the Oneida Casino and its possible impacts on workers and customers is very important and should be listened to in full in the video excerpt below.
Just as she declined to do to Rae Skenandore, Brenda didn’t pull the same blustering bullsh¡t moves on Julie Barton that got her put squarely in her place by Leah Dodge.
(Apologies for the terrible sound issues with the Tribe’s video, but our understanding is that’s Brenda John-Stevens’ department)
Pat Pelky’s answer wasn’t super inspiring and he basically said he’s okay accepting DNR and EPA standards of toxic pollutants going into the sludge lagoons rather than having the Tribe actively exercise its legal rights to challenge the status quo and fight for stricter guidelines of what’s ‘acceptable.’
Oneida Eye has previously conveyed that it’s imperative that the next Oneida Business Committee establish relationships and work with local, state, national and international environmental allies to combat pollution and to prevent the Tribe from wasting time & money and endangering the health, safety & welfare of Oneida people and the reservation with incineration schemes, whether they be based on municipal solid waste, plastics or the biomass pellet-burning project that the BC recently voted to support.
While one would hope that she’d learned her lesson on April 2, that’s obviously expecting too much as demonstrated by Brenda John-Stevens being just as damn stupid – if not worse – at the Budget Input Discussion on the evening of Tuesday April 8, 2014, the video of which will hopefully be posted on the Members Only section of the Tribe’s website soon.
Somehow we have a feeling the fireworks from that meeting will also be made visible to the wider public, as well they should.
