Look Up, Look Way Up. It's Not The Friendly Giant, It's Supervisor Mary Anne Gale

 

Enter At Own Risk: Topinabee restrooms are a hotbed of imminent illegal and criminal behavior.

Mullett Township Supervisor Mary Anne Gale's "Fact Sheet" attempting to justify video surveillance at the TDA's Topinabee Restrooms offers one person's very negative view of Topinabee and it's residents. 

Supervisor MaryAnne Gale said "over the last 2 years there have been 10 incidents on individuals defacing the men's restroom, ..reports of vagrants sleeping in the men's bathroom at least 3 times". There have been increased police patrols but no one has been apprehended. "There was no way to see it because they're doing it inside". "If we have a situation in the bathroom, we can go back and look" and "if we have another situation we can go back and look again" and "through a process of elimination" determine who is not washing their hands. Sorry, Mary Anne actually said catch a vandal. 


Supervisor MaryAnne Gale also mentioned that every MDOT rest area has video surveillance.  She then incorrectly stated that Topinabee is not on a state highway but does have 2200 cars a day drive through town. The camera footage can also be "a resource in Amber Alerts, which is abductions, and sexual assaults". 

A few short years ago we were proud to say that our Topinabee was an old-fashioned town where the local hardware store could operate like a roadside farm stand on the honor system for months at a time. People would come and go, "shopping" for that needed hardware item in an entirely "self-serve" store. Make your selection, write down your name, the item and cost, and then when spring came, stop in and pay up your account.

The losses, if any were negligible and the late Louis Hadden often commented that he had some very profitable months, living in Florida, while the community looked out for his store. 

Not now. On Supervisor MaryAnne Gale's watch and if her "facts" are to be believed, we have become a community of vandals, vagrants, meth-lab operators and sexual predators.


That is the pattern Supervisor MaryAnne Gale follows. Create a problem. Then, instead admitting a mistake was made, blame someone or something else for the problem.

Build an unsafe park that exhibits open and obvious safety hazards. Then, use a stupid solution to seasonally close the park to the very taxpayers who fund it. When the wind tears down the snow-fence, state in public and through the media that the fence was vandalized. That's nonsense and anyone who viewed the fence during the winter saw it blowing in the wind. 

Look up, way up. It's NOT the friendly giant. Mary Anne will be watching from the gables to see if you zipped up, have a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe, or spent eight hours in the restroom. Eight hours may label you as a vagrant or the world's worst constipation case. 

Supervisor MaryAnne Gale refuses to lock the restroom doors or install time locks, leaving them open to vandalism. She creates the situation and environment for vandals by leaving the doors open 24/7. Then after the one in a thousand or one in ten thousand creates a problem, she implies the  community at large including anyone who does not support her is a vandalism suspect. 

Listen to the whole April 7, 2014 Board Meeting