Or, Kinloch would have a new Mayor, except for the fact that the rest of the town's employees have apparently banded together to stop McCray from ever taking office, accusing her of voter fraud.
Betty McCray, Kinloch’s newly elected Mayor, arrived at City Hall on Thursday morning with an entourage and the intention to fire multiple city employees.
But before she could enter the building, McCray was told she was the one who was out of job.
In the parking lot, McCray was met by a half-dozen police officers and City Attorney James Robinson, who held a manila envelope under his arm containing articles of impeachment.
“You can’t come in as mayor,” Robinson said. “You have been suspended.”
McCray refused to take the envelope, saying, “You may be the attorney now, but I promise you, you won’t be later.”
Robinson also told Alderman Eric Petty, an ally of McCray’s, that the board had drafted articles of impeachment against him. Petty, too, refused to accept them.
“We won,” he said. “It’s time for them to move on.”
The reason? A very shifty story about voter fraud in a town where actual registered voters maybe number in just the dozens.
According to documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch through a records request, the city has raised concerns to the St. Louis County Board of Elections and the Missouri Secretary of State about people being registered to vote in Kinloch who no longer live there. On April 2, the city gave the Election Board a list of 27 names of people who it claimed were illegally registered; many of those individual addresses were listed at city-owned apartments.
McCray said that the concerns about people’s being illegally registered were “absurd.”
“It never came up until I ran for mayor,” she said, adding that people were still living at the addresses the city claims are empty.
At least two of the apartments in question on Tuttle Street, where six people are registered to vote, according to the city, appeared this week to have been unoccupied for some time. Both were stripped of furniture and appliances. In one, a jar of pickles and two spent oxygen tanks sat amid other debris on the floor.
Petty said the homes were vacant because the city began evicting people behind on rent shortly before the election because the tenants were supporters of McCray.
But City Manager Justine Blue said that wasn’t true. The only people who the city is evicting still live in their apartments, she said. The city did file lawsuits to evict some residents, but that was on Thursday, court records show. Blue said those residents have yet to be formally served with eviction notices.
“Besides, we would have no idea who would be supporting Ms. McCray,” Blue said.
This story is getting truly strange if you ask me. Somebody's clearly guilty of massive fraud and laying, but I couldn't tell you who.
But here's a hint as to which side I believe is on point: When you have twenty cops for a town of 300 people and the new mayor decides to make fixing that her top priority? Things will play out as evidenced above.
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1 comment:
Typical of what happens when the little people beat those who have been in power. Since when do the police get to behave as judge and jury. Who the hell decided the police should be used to prevent the newly elected mayor from taking office? How about an investigation done by an outside agency? There are channels available for such a problem. Use them and let third party mediators figure it out. Yeah, I have a real problem with the present power structure using the police dept. to carry out their dirty deeds. Is this the U.S.A. or the middle east?
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