At the end of the village council meeting Sept. 9, during the time when commissioners give individual reports, Commissioner of Accounts and Finance Maria Maxham called out the council for not working well together and making staff’s jobs harder by overstepping in daily operations.
Maxham said this culture was made all the more evident after the Blue Line shootings on Labor Day. As commissioners talked about how to honor the police department following the murders, Maxham said she noticed something.
“It’s probably the first time all of us commissioners have kindly talked to one another in a really long time,” Maxham said.
The police department told commissioners they didn’t want any kind of gesture, that they were doing their jobs.
“Every single day, the police department and the fire department and every other department here is just doing their jobs,” Maxham said, “And a lot of times, they do it despite us here as a council and the way we interact with one another.”
While Maxham said that even she can be petty at times, she said that the condescending way commissioners speak to each other leads to a hostile workplace.
“The emails I’ve seen, the way people are talked to, is completely unacceptable, and nobody should have to work in that kind of environment,” Maxham said. “In any other kind of line of work, if we weren’t elected officials, it would not be allowed to continue.”
Maxham was unwilling to divulge details about certain colleagues or interpersonal relationships.
“One of the reasons I’m hesitant to talk about specific examples of people doing things wrong, or how I perceive is wrong,” Maxham told the Review, “is because I really want to focus on how do we do better for this town, and how do we do better for the residents?”
Qualms with commissioner government
Maxham told the Review that she chalks up the village council’s current culture to commissioners not working together or communicating well, plus the commissioner form of government under which the village operates.
“We don’t work together to be as productive as we could be, and I think we all share responsibility for that,” Maxham told the Review. “And some commissioners, by trying to be too hands-on in the running of the day-to-day activities of their department, get in the way of staff doing their jobs and create a really hostile environment for people,” Maxham said.
The latter Maxham chalks up to the commissioner form of government in which commissioners have executive power over their departments. She said she spoke against the form of government when she was campaigning for village council.
According to the Forest Park code, as commissioner of accounts and finance, Maxham has jurisdiction over, and supervision of, the fire department.
“Nobody without substantial experience in firefighting, for example, including myself, should have supervisory or executive power over the fire chief,” Maxham said. Though such jurisdiction is in her job description, “I’m going to be failing this town because I’m getting in the way of people doing their jobs and coming in with no experience, trying to tell people with lots of experience what to do.”
Maxham said the commissioner form of government allows commissioners to overstep their bounds in managing daily operations, not giving village department heads the respect they deserve.
“I’ve had senior staff today tell me that, currently, we have one of the worst cases of over-involvement in the day-to-day and in telling department heads how to do their jobs,” Maxham said.
The path forward
At the end of her commissioner report Monday, Maxham asked commissioners to step up their communication for two upcoming projects: rewriting the village’s zoning code and the salary ordinance. Both, she said, will require lots of discussion and listening to commissioners’ opinions.
The Planning and Zoning Commission has had a series of meetings with a consultant to understand the village’s residential zoning. They’re also rewriting parts of the code for the village council to approve, though commissioners haven’t voted on any code updates at meetings yet.
“It’s the kind of thing where I think there’s going to be, and should be, a lot of very specific questions from the council before we vote,” Maxham said.
Maxham said that, often, commissioners will come to village council meetings with concerns that they haven’t communicated to staff ahead of time. While she thinks commissioners should also ask questions during village council meetings so that the public can benefit, she doesn’t want staff to be put on the spot.
“It feels like it’s more important to have this special ‘gotcha’ moment than to actually have a meaningful conversation about how we can improve this town,” Maxham said at the last village council meeting. “Let staff come prepared so we can actually do better than we’re doing right now.”
At the end of August, the village council was supposed to have a closed session to discuss its salary ordinance, but one commissioner was sick and the meeting was postponed, Maxham said.
Though it hasn’t been rescheduled, Maxham said she wants to hold a special meeting about salary ordinances, then go into closed session to further discuss before officially voting on the ordinances in open session.
Maxham said she’s frustrated the meeting hasn’t been rescheduled and encouraged commissioners to ask staff questions ahead of the salary ordinance’s closed session.
“Guys, we need to get our s*** together,” Maxham said to end her commissioner report Monday. “This is enough.”
“We need to stop and think about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We need to do better so that we can better serve this town,” Maxham told the Review. “I think it is the focus for all the commissioners and for the mayor individually, but I think we need to come together somehow and figure out how to move forward in a much more positive direction.”
Before being appointed to the village council by Mayor Rory Hoskins in 2021, Maxham was the editor of the Forest Park Review.