Your Lady Yokels have had quite the week, so please accept our apologies for the lateness of this post. This is, however, a hobby. And as important as we believe it is to keep informed on what our locals are up to, sometimes life gets in the way!

Meeting starts off very nicely by recognizing the awesome science award that Oakdale Middle School teacher, April Clark, received. Many nice words about educators and the importance of what they do are said. And we are very pleased. We learned later that Kirby told her this joke as she walked along shaking everyone’s hands:

Two chemists walk into a bar. The first one says, “I’ll have H2O”. The second one says,
“I’ll have H2O too.” The second one dies. He claims she got a kick out of it, and maybe she did! But man, what a dad joke!

Any hoo! Off to the meeting.  Our favorite curb guy is back for public comments. He wants salaries raised for both the county council and the county executive because we are now living in the 21st century! And we agree! Only those who make a pretty significant outside salary can afford to serve on the council. Kirby later disagrees with this request. Says he isn’t in it for the money. Which kinda misses the whole point.

We are super confused because Billy votes FOR the budget adjustment and approves the meeting minutes. Guess he no longer wants a budget analyst for the council.

The bulk of the meeting was about what initiatives the council should send to our  Maryland delegation. Tony starts off by carefully wording his motion to allow homeschool students participate in extracurricular activities by stating that he was only looking for a vote to allow the motion to go to public hearing. It didn’t mean that they would actually send it off to the delegation. On that point the council agreed.

Then it’s Billy’s turn. He wants to take RV’s out of the personal property category and place them into real property category. Says he wants to do this so people can have other ways to finance an RV. M.C. says that in order for an RV to be considered a house it has to meet HUD guidelines. For example, it can’t have wheels, must be on a piece of land that the owner either owns or rents, and has to be hooked up to the electrical grid. Well, since Billy’s very lazy bill doesn’t say anything about what would constitute an RV, M.C. doesn’t believe that they can make a law that will be potentially be in violation of federal guidelines. You know Federalism. Billy’s standard line with all his suggestions tonight are, “We should move it to a public hearing to see what the public says.” Translation: “I am not going to make this bill any clearer, or do any research. Let’s see if someone else can do that for me.” Billy has another initiative, this time he wants to exempt affordable housing from the forest ordinance. Billy couldn’t answer Jessica’s question about whether this should be done at the county or state level and also avoids M.C.’s questions by saying, you guessed it: “I just want to take it to a public hearing.” (See above translation).

Jessica has an initiative about the Safe Harbor policy concerning youth victims of human trafficking. Thankfully Billy did not take this opportunity to speak up for those in favor of exploiting our fellow humans. Kirby wants to give his tax credit to first year teachers and first responders and police in their first or second year on the job. This honestly doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since this is  a real estate credit and how many of these folks own homes? There is talk about how it isn’t fair to only reward one segment of society. Motion fails.

The next part of the meeting concerns the $400,000 block grant given to the county to make curbs ADA accessible. One concerned citizen, who took his complaints about the curbs all the way to the Justice Department, is here to speak. We do admire his passion and are glad things are getting fixed. Here’s some slides from the presentation in case you are interested:

Billy uses this chance to admonish the department for underestimating the amount of money it would take to fix all the curbs. So, we apologize if you were playing our Bingo game, because you would have a raging headache today for the amount of times you had to fill in the block about a county employee being put out. Billy thinks they should send someone out to re-do the estimates, which would cost even more money.  As usual, he knows not of what he speaks!

Off to comments. Tony tells the story of how his employee’s daughter was at the concert in Las Vegas. We were not only saddened but very angry over what occurred Sunday evening. For how many times are we going to sit around and allow this type of thing to occur? When a mass shooting occurred in Australia in 1996, they acted immediately.  And while we sympathize with Tony’s employee and every single concert goer and family member that has had to live through this nightmare, we will not tolerate the old hopes and prayers line. This is the time for action, and if you are only willing to say really sucky things like this:

Then you can kiss our Yokel butts! This IS absolutely the time to talk about gun control. We reject the notion that it is disrespectful! If anything, it’s really disrespectful to talk of anything else when fifty eight people’s lives ended too soon. While we are not hopeful that our legislators will do anything of substance, we wholeheartedly reject the notion that this is not the time to talk about gun restrictions.

Billy informs us that the county gets bad legal advice. And he sees it everyday and all of us are at risk under this administration. And we are too angry after reading Kirby’s twitter feed  to comment any more on his nonsense, so:

Peace Out!