Venting from Within: A Member Breaks Ranks

A dissenter in our local Community Council?!  

An executive member’s recent exposé outlines the fear, entitlement and humorlessness he’s observed from the inner circle of EFCC.

The post showed up yesterday morning — innocuously titled “A Neighborhood Story” but the tale that unfolded seemed more like a Latin soap opera. A familiar one for us, at that:  it’s no secret that our blog has had a less than warm welcome from Community Council (to say the least).

For the last year, we’d been documenting some jaw-dropping shenanigans at meetings — and kinda wondering, is it us? Are we imagining things? Cause everyone assembled seems totally cool with some of the most effed up stuff. In public, yet!

Like it’s normal to declare war on school buses who dare disturb a morning’s peace, for instance. Or try to swat away hundreds of thousands of dollars in much-needed landscaping for Mifflin because of weird personal vendettas. To us interlopers, established local politics here seems eerily cultish.

Imagine our delight when we stumbled upon this exciting blog post by an actual member of EFCC describing similar observations!

Let’s dive into the juicy parts of an Executive Committee member’s poetically blunt exposé…

It’s a small neighborhood which is also home to a startling number of community organizations. There’s a development corporation and given how little has actually been developed, I can’t tell if the name is hopeful or delusional. Change comes slowly here.

So true:  EFCC, EFDC, EFBA, EFF.  And, except for EFF (who’s still new, yet), all of these have committees — and sometimes, committees within committees, and executive branches of  said committees…. and on and on. If you wanted to, I bet you could go to a meeting every day in East Falls.

The blog then details how EFCC was especially aiming to freshen up their image when they approached the author to join their leadership. Talked him into it, basically, and then oddly required him to go thru the interview process, and endure a grilling by the selection committee:

During the interview, I was asked, “What made you decide to join the counsel?” I replied, “Um, because you asked me to.” My response was greeted by blank stares. No one laughed. I watched three sets of lips fall open, forming little Os which promptly collapsed, in unison, into wrinkling lines of thin-lipped disapproval, then into those Os again, making them look surprised, then disgruntled, then surprised again.

Ah, but he’s chosen! We love his wrap-up of what he encounters…

I assumed the role of (–) in October. Since then, I have stumbled upon:

A shrill, disruptive harpy and her evil factotum who have joined forces to become a kind of toxic Batman and Robin, a decades old scandal involving a pair of librarians, an elderly tree-hugging dowager overly fond of bourbon, and a mysterious couple who run the local newspaper with their own unfathomable agenda.

While we’re terribly flattered to be called mysterious (!!), this piece hits hardest when the tone turns philosophic:

Privilege gives rise to entitlement. People are motivated by many things but none more than entitlement. And fear.

It’s that sense entitlement that led one person at one meeting to ask SEPTA, Pennsylvania’s regional transportation entity responsible for all public transportation, to remove the bus stop in front of his house because riders leave trash in his garden, and prompted another to ask SEPTA to reroute the bus that ran down her street because the lumbering diesel-drinking beasts are noisy and disrupted her sleep…. 

Fear, is the other motivator. A recent proposal to change zoning along a particularly dismal stretch of East Falls, to encourage commercial development, led to widespread panic… I couldn’t help but be reminded of the spinster who fears there are men hiding under her bed. Fear of change, has led many to see men under the bed, as if any change, every developer, was a horny half-man, half-beast waiting to pounce and ravish East Falls.

Wow, looks like there’s another snarker in town. Check out the full post — and uncover his secret identity!