Statement from Trustee Reichle on "crap show" of meeting-June 17th

If I would have been allowed to speak uninterrupted at our crap show of a meeting last night, I would have said my piece, voted and dropped it. Since I was constantly rudely interrupted, I am bringing this directly to the people. East China Township is a relatively small township when it comes to our residential population. We have a water and sewer plant, provide garbage collection, police and fire protection as well. With DTE in our township we receive a massive amount of tax revenue. Our taxable value has gone up significantly as well as our tax rate since the early 2000s. In other words we have a ton of money.

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In the recent past our board decided to hire a township manager. This raised the administrative costs in the office, but without a full-time supervisor, was deemed necessary. Within the last couple years our board voted to increase the salary of that position by a very large amount $30-$40,000, if memory serves. Obviously, this person is to oversee many aspects of the township, like that of a city manager position. Since that pay raise our township manager has not had more work to do, in fact, if anything they are doing less work. Now, after our meeting last night we are hiring a “public utility director” who will oversee the water plant and sewer plant supervisors as well as the DPW director. Since this position deals heavily with water and sewer, this will add a significant amount to those costs. After taking away that workload we did not ask the township manager to forgo some of that massive pay raise we gave. In fact, we padded the contract even further by providing insurance, even though there is a provision to provide $750 per month “cash in lieu” of that.

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Our park manager who has not been full time is also going to be provided with insurance even though in the wintertime there are times when they log zero hours and as many as 15 per week. The board did not even ask these employees to kick in or pay a portion of it. It was claimed that they logged hours for the last year and as we previously discussed that employee was given directives to log 40 hours to “make up for insurance”! That’s called fraud. In fact, they gave this person wage increases to make up for insurance. The park manager is the only supervisor that does not punch a time clock, other than the township manager. I have the emails and meeting minutes to prove it! We fought like hell to bring this employee under the control of the township for this reason and now they are trying to cover everything up and act as though those things never happened. Is it because all the sudden the township manager needs insurance? It makes no sense to me. The township manager negotiated a great contract 2 years ago and moment it became somewhat not convenient, we just jump to change it. We are trustees to safeguard taxpayer money, not to be a charity or piggy bank.

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The added health care costs are going to be an additional $54,000 per year, which on top of the $90,000 for the new utility director position (not including other benefits) and 20 paid days off to start and he is allowed to bank 40 of them! This is better than every other contract in the township. Where do we draw the line? When does it end? One board member was on the fence, agreed with most of what I said and ended up waffling in the end. The treasurer was the only other board member to end up taking a stand against this. Water rates are already slated to go higher by 5% with these additional costs it will be much more! I will not vote for those increases either. Enough is enough. One of my fellow board members continuously interrupted me as I attempted to make points respectfully and he tried to “call the question” as I still had the floor for someone who has been there a while, obviously he does not know parliamentary procedure. He just did not want to hear the truth. Our supervisor who is supposed to run the meeting and keep order did not do his statutory job and asked me to keep speaking over the other trustee. It was a crap show to say the least. I sat and listened to every other view and yet they could not let me for a few minutes to make a point.

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I was accused by that same trustee of having a vendetta against that employee. I like her as a person, I really do, but even if I had a friend that was doing this, I would call it out. This is nothing personal and I am a big believer in “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

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Last night our board failed in safeguarding tax dollars which is our only job as trustees. I will be posting more about this soon and when your water bills go up and taxes do not yell at me. Yell at the supervisor, clerk and 2 trustees that voted for this mess! More to come-Allen