Sault Ste. Marie, Mi...Chairman McCoy is a likeable man. But the problem here is that he is in the top leadership position of your tribe. You have to judge him by his actions and not his words.
Ominous beginnings...when Chairman McCoy first sat in the driver's seat he felt it was necessary to fire 200 of his political opponents and to then take away the few remaining rights of you people who work for the Sault Tribe. This was a clear indicator of the new Chairman being under the influence of longtime employee director Bouschor, the driving force behind his campaign and the man who financed it. What did Bouschor get out of doing it? He got help with his search for a political solution to his legal problems with you...mainly the 7+1 litigation, where the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that he had acted without authority and that the key employees had signed a severance agreement and quit their jobs.
The last gasp of a democracy is when a government ignores the will of the people who they serve. Democracy is about as good as dead then. In the summer of 2010 you voted in a secretarial election (tribal referendum) to separate the Chairman and CEO positions with the intention of taking tribal politics out of tribal business decisions. To date, the board has refused to implement it. The Chairman still continues to hold and exercise the authority of both of the positions. What's more, the McCoy administration is once again tampering with your right to petition your government...first requiring a raised stamp on petitions and now forbidding them to be sent through the mail.
The final act of becoming a dictatorship is to completely ignore your will. Not only are you refused the right to express your political opinions in your newsletter, but now your right to petition your government is being tampered with and in effect it is being refused. And about those referendums that happen in spite of these obstructions, the McCoy administration simply doesn't honor them and simply allows them to be ignored by the people who you elect to represent you.
Looks like you're back to the worst of times. With Bouchor back on the board and influencing the inexperienced and naive chairman, Joe McCoy, the Sault Tribe is behaving like a corporation again. Its government has circled its wagons and things are being done in complete secrecy of you. The Chairman and his cronies have once again surrounded themselves with your lawyers and they are asking them to confirm what they can do legally to get away with obstructing the referendum process and to pass the proposals that they want to...like those surrounding Indian Energy LLC and the proposed Romulus Casino...in spite of your laws and your bylaws.
Judicial review...in a democracy you commonly take your complaints about your government's behavior to a constitutional court. The court reviews the constitutionality of the government's action and if necessary rules on it. In the Sault Tribe there's nothing that you can do when your government violates its constitution. The government rams proposals down your throats because they can do it and get away with it and you have to lump it and like it.
With the election of Hollowell and Pine, two additional light weight political thinkers were added to the board. Like chairman McCoy himself, they come to tribal government without any previous governing experience. Both of them are uneducated in government and naive about the motives of their longtime counterparts, and as a result, they are easily led and influenced.
Director Bouschor subsequently has wormed his way back into a leadership role on the board. Behaving like a secret club again, the board is back to honoring his code of secrecy. They're busy discussing, with the help of your lawyers, ways to defeat your will, rather than ways for you to express it and to have it heard.
Thank you, Charles Forgrave
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