At the Feb. 18 meeting of the Black Diamond City Council the mayor was at it again. She engaged aggressively in debate against City Council members. She complained hostilely to council member Brian Weber just for coming prepared with something written down that he wanted to say.

The mayor doesn’t have a vote on council and her role is to preside over the meeting and ensure that the meeting is well run according to council rules. Her role is not to debate council matters.

What was the issue at hand? Rather than approve her Planning Commission nominees immediately, the council wanted the appropriate committee to review and research first. She couldn’t accept that the council might want to follow its process and do formal research before it took a vote on something.

This is ridiculous. It is political. The mayor didn’t support new council members Weber and Pat Pepper in last fall’s election because Weber and Pepper ran on a platform to control and manage that massive YarrowBay development planned for Black Diamond. But the voters overwhelmingly chose Weber and Pepper. You may remember that the mayor and council members Tamie Deady and Janie Edelman said during their original campaigns that they also did not support the excessive development in Black Diamond. It seems they’ve gone 180 degrees to the other side. Why are they wasting time and money fighting when the voters have expressed their choice again with a landslide of 70 percent?

There’s already so much traffic in the area. The developer is moving forward. And the mayor is wasting time arguing about council rules? I’ve heard that she has spent thousands of dollars of wasted city attorney fees on it too. But the council has done this legally every step of the way.

The mayor is supposed to keep order and make sure the rules are followed, not argue with the council. This behavior is completely unprofessional. If the mayor can’t adhere to her duty to keep order at the meeting and stop interfering with the council then perhaps she should step down.

It’s mind-boggling to me that after we keep voting to control and manage the massive developments threatening to surround our small town, that the mayor or anyone would refuse to move forward with what the people clearly wanted.

Paul M Gilara

Black Diamond