Know Who You are Voting For: Part 3

  

Aaron Myszka was on the Village Board for just over 7 months when he filed his candidacy papers for Village President. Here are my observations and opinions about him.

   He certainly is a friendly and talkative person who obviously likes to be liked. 

He is good friends with Alex Vedvik, who reportedly recruited Myszka as a trustee candidate in 2024 for support of Vedvik's efforts at Village Board meetings. 

    At meetings that they both attended, and not counting routine votes like "to adjourn" or to go into or out of closed session, Myszka voted in lockstep with Vedvik 129 times out of 133 possible votes. Of those 4 opposing votes, Myszka was called to vote before Vedvik, likely making the opposing vote inadvertent. Many of those votes contradict the principles that Myszka claims to now represent as a candidate for village president.

Trustees Kelly Coyle and Alex Vedvik have been a constant source of embarrassment to Village Board meetings since 2023, with their ongoing pettiness, leftist-type personal attacks, and general in-the-weeds drama-queen antics. They both considered running against Chris Voll for village president, but backed out. Having no one else from the left to run against Voll, they put up Aaron Myszka as their candidate.

No one knew for sure how unpopular Voll had become, and surprisingly Myszka beat out Voll by about 2 to 1, with both trailing behind the conservative candidate David Baker. What was apparently a protest move by Myszka and friends against Chris Voll turned out to put an unqualified Aaron Myszka on the ballot for Village President in April, reportedly to his own dismay, as Myszka has stated that he knows little to nothing about being village president and that if elected, he would need to call former president Voll often for advice.

As generalized as Aaron Myszka's campaign rhetoric is, it has not been verified at all by his actions as a Village Board member over the past few months.

For example, in a short City pages questionnaire, he mentioned "leadership" 7 times, along with a lack of "constructive dialog", so let's start with that.

Leadership

In spite of his "lack of leadership" rhetoric, Aaron Myszka has shown ZERO indication of any leadership qualities of any kind in his few months on the Board.

• While he rightly criticizes Chris Voll several times for poor leadership in the article, he has never done so at Village Hall. The fact is that Aaron Myszka voted repeatedly to support Voll at nearly every turn from last April until now.

• His City Pages comments about Voll's poor leadership were made only a few days away from when Aaron voted to grant Chris Voll full administrative authority as interim village administrator. An act that totally contradicted his "lack of leadership" statements to the public.

• Amazingly, Myszka has since stated that if he gets elected, he will need to have Voll's number on speed dial for ongoing advice.

• Alex Vedvik also confirmed that if elected, Myszka would need people around him to guide his actions and decisions.

   
• Anyone who voted for Aaron Myszka for president in the primary as a protest vote against Chris Voll, may end up very disappointed in the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" result if Myszka is actually ever elected and surrounded by the Voll crowd as "advisors".
  

The "constructive dialog" that Aaron Myszka mentions as being important, has up to this point been consistently hampered by his two alleged mentors Kelly Coyle and Alex Vedvik. As mentioned above. Myszka went along with, and supported the chronic disruptive behavior of these two trustees. He certainly never said a word to stop such nonsense or to bring the conversation back on point, why should we expect him to start now?

The reality is that Coyle, Voll, and Vedvik will be gone as of mid-April. We can automatically expect the bellowing contention and rambling, divisive pettiness that they have brought to so many meetings to go with them.

    Unless of course, the voters bring in the Coyle camp candidates Terry Lewis-Birkett, Ryal Leff, and Jessica Stowell. In which case I believe the immature Coyle-like antics will continue, and Aaron Myszka will not say a word to prevent any of it. (See the separate post on the trustee candidates)

With all of Aaron Myszka's ties and loyalty to his personal friends and handlers, it seems safe to assume that a vote for Aaron Myszka is effectively a vote for a continuation of potential unchecked meeting disruption, and more Voll politics.

A local Ambulance Service

Aaron Myszka's complete loyalty to Theresa OBrien's local ambulance plan is an example of how easily he can be wrongly influenced. He supported this plan from moment he heard it, instead of considering overwhelming public input and factual evidence against the idea. 

   He has voted in favor of issues that support this ill-conceived plan at least 17 times in their efforts to wrangle this plan through without level-headed scrutiny. Yet, he cannot explain any merits of it, other than to generally repeat the idea that he wants "something to be proud of", and the misguided thought that this proposal will actually generate revenue for the village.

• OBrien's plan originally called for a $720,000 start up debt, and predicted a $10,000 per year profit over maintaining the current contract with Riverside.

• It was later discovered that OBrien forgot to include the interest on the debt, which brought the annual debt service projection up fro $72,000 to $90,000, and replaced the $10,000 projected profit with an $8,000 annual loss.

• Research later showed numerous other negative discrepancies with the facts and figures of OBrien's plan, including assumed $5 per hour wages, and a state expert on ambulance services cautioning the Board of a likely $200-300,000.00 annual deficit  that would need to be subsidized by taxpayers.

• The reality is that all ambulance services like this need taxpayer subsidies in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kronenwetter's current cost under the Riverside contract is an enviable $8.50 per capita. The inevitable outcome of the proposed plan is expected to be upwards of $35-40 per capita, and for potentially slower and lower grade service.

• OBrien seems to have given up on trying to justify her plan of any basis of merit, but instead has resorted to polarizing politics, petty, unprofessional attacks on our current ambulance provider, and by political action in supporting those in the election who will vote for her interests.

• Myszka has bought into OBrien's plan, even though no one seems to know at this point what the plan actually is, or how much the taxpayers will need to pay annually in support of it. His stated reason for still supporting it is that "we can use the cash flow", even though the "cash flow" is projected to be negative to the tune of $250-300,000 per year.

Village Financial Recovery

Aaron Myszka seems to be unaware of conservative financial concepts.

• He admits that he wants to raise taxes, it's just that he doesn't want any "sharp" increases.

• There does not seem to be a single spending item that came to the Village Board, that he did not vote to approve.

• This included voting to create $8 million dollars in debt, just as I had predicted last March, for what likely could have been done for more like $5 million.

• He appears to subscribe to Alex Vedvik's preference to go into debt for capital expenditures to free up tax money for current operating expenditures. This is unsustainable, and based entirely on "hope" of future growth or other good news to try to pay off that debt.

• Cutting wasteful spending seems to not be an option with him.

• He voted for a pay raise for trustees.

• He voted three times to spend more on legal fees, raising the costs to 1000% of the normal annual amount of a few years ago. This included $17,000 to defend just one employee against legal complaints that the village attorney said have not serious consequences.

• In short, he says what the taxpayers want to hear, but his actions speak louder than his words. He likes to spend your tax money.

Accountability, "Supporting Staff", and Staff Retention.

    These do not always go together, as it assumes that we always hire perfect people, and this is not a realistic expectation.

    Aaron Myszka has avoided holding people accountable, and he seems to confuse this milquetoast approach with the concept of "supporting staff". Instead, poor management causes a great disservice to employees and to the Village as a whole.

• Myszka unconditionally supported the re-nomination of a village clerk without regard for the performance concerns that other trustees had.

• He states that he has no interest in investigating the $65,000 in misappropriated taxpayer funds, that went to serve the private political interests. The expenditure for this report was never authorized by the Village Board or any other legal due process. Myszka's unwillingness to even look into this (basically a theft of funds) shows that his loyalty to his associates is greater than his loyalty to taxpayers or to his oath of office.

• Similarly, Aaron Myszka seems to make no distinction between "supporting the staff" and condoning unprofessional and insubordinate staff behavior. The public input fiasco of May 13, 2024, is a prime example.

• This is the same staff who's members supported his candidacy and election as trustee.

• This is the same staff that once elected, he voted to give $2000 each to, as a "bonus", without any documentation as to why, and in disregard for the Board vote to research the matter first.

• Myszka repeats the old "staff retention" mantra that the Voll/Coyle/Vedvik crowd has been misrepresenting for several years now. With a few exceptions, it appears to me that the problem has never been that too many good workers are leaving, but instead it has been that "the wrong fit" people were being hired to begin with, and then NOT being held accountable due to a misguided "support the staff" philosophy. This in turn encourages certain employees to think poor performance is acceptable, which has caused major problems for the Village. 

   Each  resignation for whatever purpose is then exploited falsely for anti-conservative, political purposes.

For the most part, this cycle seems to have ended.  "Good fit" employees now hold the office department head positions (the Board has very little control over police and fire chiefs).

The last key position left to fill is village administrator. While Kelly Coyle has apparently worked overtime and under the table to try to bring in a ringer for this position, the good news is that there are qualified administrators willing to fill that position IF the election brings in a qualified president and reasonable Board members.

Transparency, or lack thereof

• Myszka voted to censor factual information from meeting minutes, concealing important information from the public.

• He participated in unlawful closed session discussions on August 26th, 2024 on items that the public should have been allowed to know about.

• Last year as a candidate for trustee, he has avoided any open public exposure at candidate forums, just as he has declined the invitation to a debate or similar events this year. He seems to avoid any public questions or events at which he is not sheltered and protected by his supporters on the left. This is not "transparency".

Conclusion

This is certainly not meant to be a complete list of Aaron Myszka's shortcomings. It should however provide enough food for thought to realize that he has been a pawn of the insiders and manipulators since he was recruited to run for trustee over a year ago.

We have a Village that not only needs to be operated efficiently, but currently also needs to be pulled out a financial, ethical, and organizational tailspin of the past two years, in order to be brought up to the point of "operated efficiently".

In other words, we need a quarterback as president, not a cheerleader. We need a ship's captain and not a cabin boy if we want to turn this ship around.

While Providence has provided us with the imminent removal of three elected officials who were seen to be the chronic core of Kronenwetter's problems, there is a lot of repair and rebuilding to do which requires knowledgeable experience, and with a good, functional Village Board in place.

Aaron can help as trustee if he is willing to do so, but the fact is that he is much too closely associated and influenced by the people who have been the cause of the problems, to be any kind of leader in resolving those problems.

To quote Mr Einstein: "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that we used when we created them."

The bottom line here is that we need a new president and conservative trustees with a fresh new outlook and ideas. The LAST THING we need is to bring in the same kind of people who have gone along with and are supported by, the toxic, drama-laden, devisive philosophies and examples of the three officials who are on their way out.