Commie Posse Status
Special joint Council/Planning Commission meeting on code enforcement Wednesday, and I’m a card-carrying member of the DSA.
Will Church told me an anecdote about a Village constable back in the ’70s whose code enforcement proclivities were greatly enhanced with generous lashings of beer from the Mayfair Tavern. I won’t name the good constable here, because unless I find the story on a microfiche somewhere, it’s hearsay.
When I moved to Elberta in 2010, I didn’t know who the code enforcement officer was, until one day it seemed to be DPW superintendent Ken Bonney. His code enforcement proclivities tended toward the improvisational. He did serve me with a notice to mow my lawn once or twice. In his defense, many of our codes at the time were hard to enforce, because there was no official (written) policy or procedure regarding what constituted an actionable complaint, how many warnings if any the accused should receive, what the appeal process was, or what if any fines would be assessed. Many codes had not been reviewed by an attorney in a long while, if ever.
One of the first things I did as a trustee was make the pdf of the Village Code on the Village website searchable. How are you supposed to be a law-abiding citizen if you don’t know you’re not allowed to, per Chapter 9016: Disorderly Conduct 2. (dd), (cc), (bb), spit on the sidewalk, prowl any alley at night without permission, or wander about without a satisfactory account of yourself? I mean, who among us?
Most code enforcement involved DPW dropping off a notice and maybe a printout of the relevant code and hoping the violator would clean up their act voluntarily. Dogs roamed and shat freely, cats moved into empty houses, cars piled up in yards, garbage fires blazed, M-80s exploded at all hours of the day and night, grass grew — mass hysteria. Many of the violators were members of council (not just me) or were on the Village payroll.
And this was a big problem for the last Village code enforcement officer, Mike Palermo, who resigned in September 2022. You can read his letter and council’s discussion of his resignation here (search for “Palermo” to get straight to it). Constableless, we found that the Benzie County Sheriff was unwilling to enforce our local code (they don’t have to unless specially contracted [$$] to do so, per state law), and they even left us to fend for ourselves when it came to some state laws (see fireworks). County Commissioner Gary Sauer threw up his hands (not literally), saying, “They’re their own boss.”
Three years, many ongoing code violations, and some improvements to a few of our local laws later, we have a new candidate for CEO: Jim Baldwin, who applied for the position in early May. His application will be reviewed at a special joint meeting of Council and the Planning Commission tomorrow, Wednesday, July 2, at 5:30 p.m.
And it’s a good thing, because the level of nefarious activity seems to be ramping up, with little to no response from the Sheriff’s department. On June 3, a resident called the office to complain that someone was discharging a firearm inside Village limits, which is against our code (9016-2[d]). At our June meeting (report to come), clerk Rachel Perkins said she called the Sheriff and they refused to respond to the scene, citing our need for a code enforcement officer.
On top of that, we’re soon to acquire about 16 acres of wild parkland in the west end (the old Elberta Land Holding Company property) and 9 acres of new development, which will probably require some constabulary attention.
Jim Baldwin’s Qualifications
Jim was appointed to our planning commission in April. According to his application for the CEO position, he has a diploma from a two-year program at the Illinois Academy of Business & Public Security at the College of Lake County, and has been a reserve officer for the Corunna Police Department since 2010. He served in the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office Civil Division from May 2018 to January 2021, and as a reserve officer and code enforcement officer in Maple Rapids from 2004 to 2008. He listed three personal references in law enforcement and one in real estate. He is a resident of East Lansing, and owns the old Conundrum Building, now Blue Haven 1 & 2 short-term rentals at 603 Frankfort Avenue.
Anecdotally, I have gotten to know Jim a little bit as a consequence of my role as short-term rental coordinator, and I’ve found him to be professional, courteous, organized, and a great communicator. His family had a place on Furnace Avenue way back in the day, and he grew up coming here to fish and otherwise recreate in the summers.
Maybe he will join the Michigan Association of Code Enforcement Officers (MACEO), which I just found out about in the course of writing this article.
Way back at the meeting in 2022 when Mike Palermo resigned, council discussed creating a Code Review Committee to whip our codes into shape and make revamp recommendations. This never really got off the ground. I hope it does now, and I hope under a new CEO, some members of the community might also be interested in joining it.
Complaint Policy and Code Enforcement Contract
We adopted Policy #2024-003 Complaints at the July 2024 regular council meeting, and the official complaint form is on the Village website’s Code Enforcement page.
See the Village Code Enforcement Contract here:
House Resolution 128: Sheriff Departments to Cooperate With ICE
On June 24, the Michigan House passed Resolution 128:
A resolution to encourage county sheriffs and local law enforcement agencies throughout the state of Michigan to enter into 287(g) agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to enhance immigration enforcement and public safety.
Whereas, The 287(g) program, authorized under section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, permits the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its subagency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies, allowing designated officers to perform federal immigration law enforcement functions under the supervision of ICE. Such functions include identifying and processing removable aliens who have been arrested, enforcing limited immigration authority during routine police duties, and serving and executing administrative warrants on aliens in jail;[…]
I haven’t called the Benzie County Sheriff’s Office yet to find out if they will be taking this recommendation. I hope our local code enforcement officer doesn’t, if that’s even a thing. I would not like to see our already clearly overstretched first responders distracted by rounding up people and perhaps transporting them to the new ICE Detention Facility in Baldwin, Michigan, which opened June 16.
I’m a fan of law and order. To me that means due process, a respect for legal precedent, and a regard for everyone’s personhood and human rights no matter where they were born or how they came to be here. To me, in this country, your status as a human being is the legal status that counts the most. I want the law to apply to everyone, and I want it to be clear, not mysterious, and I want it to be created and agreed to by the people, in a transparent, democratic way. As of June 19, I am no longer a member of the Elberta Village Council, so I will not be making policy or laws, but I feel it’s important to put my cards on the table here and say that I joined the new Northwest Michigan chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America on April 21. It’s not a secret, it’s nothing to hide, and if you’re curious about it, please do take a look at the website of the national organization. It’s a political organization, not a party, and we will be doing good work to expand democracy and uphold human rights in Michigan. If you’d like to hear more about it, I’d love to talk to you. But I won’t be writing about the DSA or DSA events on this platform. There’s plenty of news of, by, and for Elbertians to cover, and I hope to do more of that, in greater depth, now that I have a bit more time. (And turtle crossing season is mostly over.)
Please keep your political opinions out of the going-on’s in Elberta. I really don’t care to hear about you being a card-holding member of the socialists party. If your opinions of ICE and how our law enforcement cooperates with them is an example of what the Elberta Alert is going to be going forward, count me out.
Thank you for sharing this information.