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No more defending Lumpy
Posted By katie allison granju
Betty Bean says she’s pretty much had it with Lumpy Lambert:
Lambert thinks he is funny, and once upon a time, so did I.
I wrote funny Lumpy Lambert stories and defended funny Lumpy Lambert antics. But that was then, and those days are pretty embarrassing to look back on now, after so many months of displays of craven, attention-craving, developer-protecting, constituent-embarrassing Lumpy behavior.
It was Lambert who carried the ball – and dropped it – on the early call for an investigation of the mayor’s office. It was Lambert who attempted to extort a promise from a candidate for a commission appointment in exchange for a vote for one of his cronies.
It was Lambert who extended the employment of Cynthia Finch for another agonizing month by publicly bullying her. It was Lambert who made the New York Times by calling a colleague an arrogant little university twit.
It was Lambert who flirted with Fansler’s wrath by not producing his cell phone records when he was ordered to do so, saying that his cell phone carrier only keeps records for six months – but ignoring the fact that he had been asked to produce them many months earlier, when the records would have been available.
And most recently, it was Greg “Lumpy” Lambert who violated both the state Open Meetings Law and Chancellor Fansler’s continuing injunction ordering commissioners not break the law anymore. His “confession,” which “forced” him and his seatmate Bob Rountree to abstain from voting, derailed a vote to authorize citizen a charter review committee, which Lambert opposed.
Here is what the law (TCA 8-44-106, paragraph c) says about behavior such as Lambert’s: “The court shall permanently enjoin any person adjudged by it in violation of this part in further violation … each separate occurrence … constitutes a separate violation.”
What Lambert did at the March commission meeting (besides making it last three times longer than it should have by running his mouth virtually non-stop for eight hours) when he said that he and Commissioner Robert Rountree had a private conversation about a public matter was a confession. Lambert evidently was expressing his disapproval of the fact that Mayor Mike Ragsdale had tapped Rountree to be a member of the Charter Review Commission.
Lambert opposes seating this commission. So Lambert – who sat through the sunshine law trial and endured the humiliation of having a jury of his peers say that he and his colleagues had broken the law – called Rountree, a brand-new appointee who hasn’t had time to learn the ropes, then turned around and informed the full commission and everybody in TV land that neither of them could vote on the measure because they’d violated the sunshine law. The Charter Review Commission failed by one vote.
The math’s not hard.
And think about this: it’s embarrassing enough that our County Commission is under court order not to break the law. But now we have to watch Greg “Lumpy” Lambert using lawbreaking as an offensive weapon.
Apr 7th, 2008
