Adding back two positions..
Cathedral of Coyoacán. Coyoacán, Mexico
The Holland Sentinel has an article today detailing a part of Tuesday’s meeting, part of which reads:
”In an already packed agenda Tuesday, Jan. 7, Ottawa County Commissioner Doug Zylstra moved to add two commission appointments in what ended up becoming a complex legal argument.
Zylstra sought to appoint longstanding Ottawa County Parks Commission President Kelly Rice to fill a public seat for a term ending Dec. 31, 2027, and former Community Mental Health Board President Vonnie Vanderzwaag to fill a seat for a term ending March 31, 2026.
The duo would fill roles previously held by Commissioners Roger Belknap and Gretchen Cosby, neither of whom were re-elected in November. Belknap sat on the Parks Commission and Cosby headed up the Community Mental Health Board.
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As the maker of the two motions on the 7th, I would like to take the opportunity to detail why I made the motion and why I made it at that meeting.
At our December 19th meeting, we chose two residents for a public slot on both the CMH and Parks board. Two long term and highly regarded volunteers, Vonnie VanderZwaag and Kelly Rice were not chosen for reappointment. I considered that unfortunate and spent the holidays thinking how we could right what I believed to be a wrong on our part.
I approached the chair shortly after our opening meeting on January 2 with the idea of giving up two commissioner slots available for 2025, so that these two individuals could once again take their former places on their former boards.
The Chair appreciated the idea, but the agenda for the January 7 meeting had already been published, so the two items could not be placed on the formal agenda. I believed it important to make sure we made the appointments before they each had their January meeting. However, both of the two boards were scheduled to meet before our next BOC meeting, so the only way to get those two individuals placed on the respective boards before their initial meetings was to add their appointments to the agenda on the January 7th at Approval of Agenda, which is a perfectly legitimate action, and one which has been taken many times.
I understand that certain people asked why we didn’t reopen the seat to the public if we were thinking about making them public seats. However, one, we had just finished up a public search just a few weeks earlier and two, the whole motion was based on the idea that we as a Board were giving up what was a formerly Commissioner designated seat precisely so that we could place these two individuals on those two boards. They were not previously public seats and would have been filled with a commissioner absent these motions.
I hope this gives a better picture of the thinking behind what happened on Tuesday and why I thought it so important.
Note 1/12 - There was talk that an impediment existed in that various commissioners appointed for 2024 may still be on the Parks and CMH boards in 2025 for some reason. This a fairly blatant disregard of Motion BC 24-008 from 1/2/2024 which appointed all commissioners through the end of 2024 and 2024 only.
