When asked about her community “Advisory Council” (which was the following day found to be largely her political campaign donors) Councilwoman Marti Emerald stated that the reason for the group was that she wanted “something a little more independent”. Really, that sounds great.
But with old Marti, the Devil is in the details, and it’s increasingly clear there is a gap between what she tells reporters and how she acts. On a lark, I asked a friend to run the voter registrations of Emerald’s Advisory Council. The results were strikingly not Independent.
On the first pass through, the elves were able to identify the party registration of 29 of 34 members of the Advisory Council. The result? 69% Democrat, 20% Republican, 11% other. Now, we’ll have the elves look a little closer today to see if we can identify the remaining 5 members, but at first blush this list simply doesn’t look very “independent”. To the contrary, when this partisan make-up is combined with the fact that virtually all of the members are donors, this group couldn’t be more of a sham (or, in the Troubleshooter’s language, a scam).
In short, it appears that to make the grade for Emerald’s private Advisory Council, you’d be well served to be a partisan Democrat, and a donor. Others need not apply.
Now for the next question: what was the partisan makeup of the original 20 members (the 34 number came four days after the original release) that met with a representative of the Mayor? Word is at least one media source, and a few others, are preparing public information requests so that we can all know the answer soon enough. Of course, Emerald could just come clean today and give the public the names of the 20, but that would require she practice the open government she preaches.