Recent allies in the effort to turn Ottawa County into a Christian Nationalist stronghold, have now turned on each other. Actions that were once applauded and supported by Joe Moss and Ottawa Impact cadre were then transcribed into a seven-page letter as accusations and cause for John Gibbs termination.
In March a complaint made by ex-Ottawa Impact commissioner Jacob Bonnema for aggressive behavior was not only dismissed but Bonnema was censured and removed from committees for having made the complaint.
There are lessons to be learned in the mudslinging from both sides. The dissatisfaction of the commissioners with their hand-picked candidate who bypassed all normal hiring practices and who did not meet the requirements of a County Administrator having no previous experience with government at the county level, reinforces the importance of expertise over ideological loyalty.
Gibbs’s criticism of the very expensive Kallman Legal Group, again a hire that bypassed all normal county hiring procedures and who has personal association to chairman Joe Moss through his business partner, was dismissed by the board and instead used against the complainant. The Déjà vu should not be ignored and layered on top of the mess the Ottawa Impact commissioners made of trying to fire the health department director – there is a serious problem here.
Doug Zylstra, the lone democrat and common-sense commissioner on the board, reported the non-Ottawa Impact commissioners did not even see the complaints about Kallman until just recently. “So that was legitimately almost three quarters of a year that they’ve known about them and we haven’t had a chance to sit down and say, ‘How much of this makes sense? What can we do to address those issues?’”
Gibbs says of the board:
“What you see with the board here and not just with me but with everything they are doing, there is a very strong spirit of vindictiveness and revenge and attacking people. It’s very unhealthy and causes constant scandal and constant lawsuits. They are really getting themselves into a lot of trouble by handling things in a spirit of conflict instead of handling things amicably as I proposed to them.”
John Gibbs
In a statement published on his website Gibbs accuses the board of corruption and incompetence. Who is right, Joe Moss and Ottawa Impact or John Gibbs, or both?
The embarrassing chaos we are observing that has turned Ottawa County into a national oddity is the natural outcome of ideological extremism. The Christian Nationalist agenda of Ottawa Impact has nothing to do with efficient county governance. We need to learn our lesson and return common sense commissioners to the board who are interested in the real job of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners.
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