It is the triumph of hope over experience, making the effort to attend monthly meetings of Southmont Borough Council and expecting progress to be any better than glacial regarding issues such as the Dahlia Street doings.
And yet I made it a point to attend Monday’s meeting, which had hidden deep on its agenda a proposed ordinance to discourage me-against-the-world protesters from clogging a street with out-of-state registered trailers, some replete with piles of junk, a car whose best days were decades back, and any other manner of unsightly things that might be expected to punish the neighbors for refusing to acknowledge and affirm any claims of the protester.
Said victim – know him as Charlie Brown since he’s fond of lamenting ad nauseam about being picked on – keeps losing in court on the matter of his family’s right to claim a so-called paper alley, one on the plans, but not improved to date. These paper alleys must be treated as regular alleys in terms of not blocking them.
It’s a simple legal point, which has been upheld in courts multiple times in this particular case, but Charlie Brown cannot/will not accept this.
Just Monday – before, during and presumably after the meeting – he was almost begging to be sent to jail on the matter.
Also, before the meeting, I made it a point to sit just two seats from Charlie Brown. He wanted to chat beforehand. We did.
Charlie’s major problem is only a passing acquaintance with facts. Example 1: He constantly claims he’s been mowing grass on that paper alley for 46 years and so has a right to it. He did it again in talking with me. I asked him his age (according to online documents on the Pennsylvania unified judicial web portal his birth date– or that of a man with the same name – is 6/3/77). Charlie did admit to being not old enough to have been cutting grass for 46 years after I told him he must have come out of the womb with a lawnmower. He said he exaggerated, but has been cutting the grass since age 10.
Example 2: I told Charlie we could discuss this matter of clogging Dahlia Street and punishing a neighbor who had not even been involved in the whole paper alley deal, but he was not going to change my mind and I likely could not change his. And I noted that Charlie had questioned my bravery on social media; me supposedly being afraid to face him man-to-man. I noted I had come to a previous meeting for just that purpose and had given him his chance to say what he had to say then. I had a witness to all this. He had deferred then. When I brought it up again Monday, Charlie said he hadn’t known who I was back then. But he’d steered his father away from sitting near me before that meeting began, noting I was the Sam Ross Jr., the enemy. When I raised this factual contradiction Monday, Charlie had to concede that he had known me at that time.
Two gross liberties taken with the facts in just a few minutes. You be the judge.
Now, let us move on to the council meeting. The Southmont meeting format is to allow upfront five minutes of commentary from residents who sign up on a sheet. Charlie made sure he was the last to sign so that he might have the final word.
During his time – he was the only speaker to have the buzzer sound denoting his time had expired – Charlie Brown lamented decades of his family being persecuted in Southmont. He did make it a point to praise one West Hills police officer in attendance for being nice and just issuing warnings to him, not citations.
But the rest of us, from council members, to neighbors, to innocent spectators, are bad people. One, a pastor, was called an “f-ing Christian” by Charlie Brown as she left the building. This should have been overheard by a newspaper reporter, by the way. I breathlessly await his report on the meeting.
One of the neighbors who has had to put up with Charlie’s street protest for 18 months or so, made it a point in her address to council to alert the police on hand that Charlie drives a truck that lacks a state inspection, which according to all I know is decidedly illegal. In fact, Charlie, or a person with his name, has been cited in Westmoreland County for just that and there is a trial scheduled for September, again according to the justice portal.
Did the police check Charlie Brown’s truck, which was driven by him to the meeting and parked behind my vehicle? I saw him drive up, leave, circle the area repeatedly and finally park again. They don’t seem to have been interested in this.
When I spoke to council, I emphasized my respect for the First Amendment and right to protest, but there are limits when it adversely affects others. On that front, Charlie Brown inexplicably seems to get kid gloves treatment despite being well over such limits.
An ordinance supposedly had been drawn up to deal with Charlie Brown and those like him, who would put rules of good citizenship in the closet, but it never got to a vote.
I’d encourage people everywhere to go to council meetings, township supervisors meetings, any of the organizations that govern their areas. You will be surprised to see how messy the sausage making is.
Southmont decided the ordinance, perhaps weeks in the making, had too many holes and would need to be redrawn before being voted upon and advertised to the public. There was hope a quick redraft could be done by the end of an excecutive session that was held in private after the public meeting was adjourned.
Perhaps we will learn more Tuesday. Maybe — even likely – we will not. But there’s always next month’s meeting.
Sam Ross Jr's site 