In a thriving Michigan county, a community goes to war with itself
Ottawa County offers a glimpse of what happens when one of the building blocks of American democracy is consumed by ideological battles
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ommission/
Everyone will have their own takeaways, and no one's mind will be changed by this. Suffice it to say that my main takeaway is that the separation of church and state is a very, very, very important thing.WEST OLIVE, Mich. — The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.
In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor.
The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.
As the session entered its fourth hour, Sylvia Rhodea, the board’s new vice chair, put forward a motion to change the motto that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery. “Whereas the vision statement of ‘Where You Belong’ has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement,” Rhodea said.
[...]
The new slogan ['Where Freedom Rings'] was largely the brainchild of Joe Moss, the 37-year-old new chair of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners and a newcomer to politics. Moss and his fellow commissioners oversaw a thriving county with a budget of $230 million. On a wall at the front of the meeting room where he now presided were 16 framed photographs of earlier boards, made up almost entirely of White, pro-business Republicans in jackets and ties.
Many of those commissioners traced their roots back to the county’s early Dutch settlers from whom they inherited a Calvinist appreciation for thrift and moderation. They rarely spent more than a few hundred dollars on election campaigns and took pride in the county’s AAA bond rating, fiscal discipline and low taxes.
Under their leadership, Ottawa County prospered. It had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Michigan and, since 2010, has been the fastest growing county in the state. Board meetings were civil, orderly and, until recently, sparsely attended. “We were rolling along good,” said Greg DeJong, a Republican who spent 12 years on the board before he was unseated. “No one came to our meetings before covid.”
Moss inhabited a different world than his predecessors. Like so many rising leaders in today’s Republican Party, his view of his country and its politics was shaped by his faith and his church, one of dozens of big evangelical congregations that had taken root amid the county’s sprawling farms and freshly sprouted subdivisions.
In these churches, traditional hymns and organ music had been replaced by electric guitars, drums, colored lights, smoke machines and modern praise songs. God existed as a tangible force at work in the county’s everyday business, battling a Devil whose presence was just as real and uncompromising.
On a typical Sunday at Moss’s Wellspring Church, people swayed and sang as the band worked its way through the 30-minute set that began every service. Then they settled into the pews and listened as their pastor warned of the “many people” in the country who were “trying to destroy everything that is righteous and good and pure and holy.” They were the sort, he said, who were demanding free condoms at school, “gender fluidity books” in the public library and drag queen story hours.
By his own admission, Moss had not paid much attention to local politics. He ran a small technology business and was focused on raising his children. Then, in the fall of 2020, the Ottawa County health department learned of a coronavirus outbreak at his daughter’s Christian school and ordered the school’s leaders to comply with the governor’s mask mandate. When they refused, state and county officials chained shut the school’s doors for more than a week and warned parents that continued resistance could bring fines and imprisonment.
Suddenly, Moss realized that those dangerous people that his pastor had been talking about on Sundays were not just in Washington and Lansing, the state capital. They were in West Olive, where the county government was headquartered. “In 2020, I became a threatened parent,” Moss said on the campaign trail. “I was threatened specifically … by Ottawa County.”
[...]
With his quarter-zip sweaters and khaki pants, Moss looked like a suburban dad out for a round of golf, one who usually kept a handgun strapped to his hip. On his group’s website, Moss warned that Ottawa County had been “strategically targeted” by the “progressive left,” even though the county had, since 1864, consistently voted Republican in presidential races.
He saw evidence of this leftist campaign in the county health department’s decision in the fall of 2021 to impose a school mask mandate for children who were still too young for the vaccine. About 1,000 people, including Moss, angrily protested the policy at a county board meeting. He saw it in the county’s “Where You Belong” motto.
And he saw it in the $470,000 that local corporations had donated to jump-start a county office of diversity, equity and inclusion. The companies, which sold auto parts and office furniture worldwide, hoped the initiative might help attract and retain global talent to a place that was more than 80 percent White and could sometimes seem unwelcoming to minorities.
Last November, commissioners backed by Ottawa Impact won eight of the 11 seats on the county board. They were now in charge of a government that they feared, overseeing county employees they did not trust.
[...]
Moss and the board’s choice to run the county health department was Nathaniel Kelly, an HVAC service manager with degrees from an online university and no experience working in public health. Kelly, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, had regularly pushed discredited covid treatments, such as the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin.
Before Moss could install Kelly, he needed a reason to fire [the sitting county employee, Adeline] Hambley. Then came a report on an obscure right-wing website that the health department was a sponsor of a local public university’s “Sex Ed Week,” which included an event called “Kinky Karaoke” and information about polyamory.
Hambley’s office issued a press release saying the health department’s role in the student-organized event was limited to testing for sexually transmitted diseases, which it did monthly on the campus. The new county administrator ordered Hambley to retract the statement, claiming it was a lie.
[...]
Hambley’s employees had taken part in the university sexual health event because they knew that people between the ages of 18 and 24 were at the highest risk for a sexually transmitted infection, she said. These were the vulnerable people they needed to reach.
But Hambley and other senior health department officials said it was becoming harder to do their jobs. “We’ve never had a county leadership opposed to the principles of public health and opposed to its own departments,” said Marcia Mansaray, Hambley’s deputy officer. “It’s disheartening. It’s exhausting … It’s toxic.”
And it was not just the health department. Across the county, government workers worried about running afoul of the new board’s edicts. Department heads canceled implicit bias training sessions, which some social workers needed for their state certifications. A clear bin with condoms that had been in the county mental health agency’s lobby bathroom for years was quietly removed. Hambley and her staff even stopped doing video conferences, worried that the new county administrator, or even Moss, might have the ability to secretly monitor them.
The sense of siege soon spread to those in the broader community. Dozens of people, supporters and opponents, were lining up to give public comment at the board’s twice-monthly meetings. The sessions, which in the past often clocked in at less than an hour, now regularly stretched longer than four.
People argued about the safety of coronavirus vaccines, the constitutionality of the lapsed mask mandates and the security of electronic voting machines. They debated whether America was a nation blessed by God or stained by racism. They deployed the old and new county mottos as rallying cries.
Sometimes the comments aimed at the new commissioners were moving and personal. A former teacher at a Christian school spoke of how his commitment to biblical literalism had nearly led to his gay son’s suicide. “He assumed that even Jesus didn’t love him,” the man told Moss and the other board members. “He had the pills lined up twice, ages 14 and 20. If he had committed suicide I would’ve been complicit in his death.”
Often the commenters expressed beliefs that seemed irreconcilable. “There is a huge revival coming that no one has ever seen before. The silent majority is silent no longer,” proclaimed a man in a dark blue button-down shirt to a burst of applause. “We will not be demonized for our faith in God and his word.”
An ordained minister in a pink down coat rose to speak a few minutes later. She gripped both sides of the lectern and leaned toward the microphone. “I am sick unto death of all the Jesus talk,” she said to cheers from the other side. “We are here for the common good.”
Rebekah Curran, one of the new commissioners endorsed by Ottawa Impact, listened to them all and often looked pained. She had moved to western Michigan three years earlier for her husband’s work and immediately got involved in local politics, starting up the Ottawa County Republican Women’s Club.
In 2021, not long after Moss founded Ottawa Impact, she invited him, his wife and another couple over for steaks. Moss told them about what had happened at his daughter’s school and his plans to fight back. Then they all bowed their heads and took turns praying for God’s will to come to fruition in their county.
Curran admired Moss’s strategic vision. He had created an infrastructure for regular people with “the right values” to run for office and win. But as time passed, she grew frustrated by his tendency to dismiss criticism and make big decisions, such as choosing Kelly to take over the health department, in secret and without public input. As far as Curran could tell, Kelly was the only person interviewed for the job. When she pressed Moss and Rhodea to explain the selection process, they brushed her off.
“We’re not going to rehash the decision,” Rhodea told her at a board meeting. Curran believed the previous board had governed in a divisive and dictatorial manner. Now she worried the new board was doing the same. “We’ve become what we despised,” she said.
[...]
Curran knew [of the Georgetown United Methodist Church, which has installed rainbow flags next to its sign]. She passed by it on her way to Resurrection Life Church, where the parking lot was crowded most Sunday mornings with hundreds of cars and Pastor Duane Vander Klok worried that it was getting harder and harder for people to hear God’s word. “In Canada it’s already illegal to speak against homosexuality,” Vander Klok said, citing laws prohibiting the promotion of gay conversion therapy.
Curran shared his concerns. She said she believed in compassion and kindness but refused to condone homosexuality and opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage. “It’s too much,” she said. Even in conservative Ottawa County she had noticed shop windows with rainbow stickers proclaiming that LGTBQ people were welcome.
“Does that mean it’s not a welcoming place for Christians?” Curran wondered. She was not sure how to respond to Crowe’s invitation. “I’d have to pray about it,” she said. Several weeks passed, and she was still praying.
[...]
Hambley was sitting down with her staff for a meeting [...] when her phone buzzed with a new calendar notification. “Oh, that’s interesting,” she said.
Two of the county’s lawyers were now coming to her regular monthly meeting with the county administrator at 10 the next morning. It seemed certain they were going to fire her. She called her lawyer, who asked a judge for a temporary restraining order.
At 9:58 a.m., the judge granted her request and scheduled a hearing for March 31.
The hearing, which had been moved to a court in Muskegon after all the judges in Ottawa County recused themselves, focused on two issues. First, whether Hambley was properly appointed as county health officer. Second, whether the new board had the authority to remove her for political, rather than public health, reasons. Hambley and Moss sat at opposite tables and avoided eye contact.
“This board is going to do its duty,” said David Kallman, who represented Moss and the board. “Miss Hambley is subject to their oversight whether she likes it or not.” Moss nodded vigorously in agreement. Hambley and her lawyer countered that Michigan law shielded her from political pressure, allowing her to make unpopular decisions needed to save lives.
“I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m not a libertarian or any of those things. And your health officers shouldn’t be,” Hambley said outside the courtroom. “They should be following good science and they should be protecting everyone in their community.”
Earlier this month, Judge Jenny McNeill agreed. She ruled that Hambley was properly appointed to the job and could only be removed if the new board could show she was “incompetent” or had neglected her duties. “The public is harmed when the law is not followed in terminating the health director,” the judge wrote.
A full trial on whether the new board has been micromanaging Hambley and interfering in her duties is likely to move forward later this year. Ultimately, it will be up to the court system to decide how a county government irreconcilably divided against itself should function.
)