to save Aeiramique Glass’s job!
Well this takes the cake! The Police Civilian Oversight Board (PCOB) wants city taxpayers to pay up to $40,000 to hire its own attorney to fight alders who want to fire interim Independent Police Monitor Aeiramique Glass.
Yeah, it’s the City of Madison v the City of Madison. Dickens’ Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
The resolution was written by a private citizen — a smart guy named Alex Saloutos. He’s a pal of the independent monitor’s number cruncher, Greg Gelembiuk. The PCOB endorsed the thing (3½ pages long) just last Friday 10-16-26. Except that it’s still not in its final form.
“You do not have authority to hire counsel and you don’t have the money to hire counsel so I drafted the resolution to see if we could solve this problem,” Saloutos told the PCOB. “I don’t know if it’s going to fly but you’ve got to ask.”
“We have a black woman move to Madison, told to assimilate … There is one black woman who is being assaulted by 7 MPD officers. … The city is freaking out that we have a strong black woman in leadership coming up against the establishment and the establishment’s knee-jerk reaction is to pick a red herring of a hiring process.” — Oversight Board member Helyn Luisi-Mills (Madison-area Urban Ministry)
Will it fly? Unlikely!
Most likely, Alds. Carmella Glenn and Julia Matthews would sponsor the request for the Oversight Board’s own lawyer. The alders were the only two (out of 20) to object at the 10-06-26 meeting to the introduction of Ald. Will Ochowicz’ motion to fire Glass.
The agenda for Tuesday’s meeting is out already. The $40,000 is not on that agenda. The council would need a two-thirds vote to suspend the rules in order to vote on it then. If there were a vote, it would require three-quarters of the Council (15 votes) in support. Conceivably, it could be offered as an amendment to the main motion but whether that would be germane is questionable. And eight alders are sponsors of the motion to fire the monitor. (Meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. The “Register to Speak” form asks for the agenda item; it is 79 95140.)
One of the sponsors of the firing motion, Ald. Figueroa Cole, noted that the Oversight Board “is in it for the long haul.” Funding its own attorney would give the PCOB the ability to “retroactively respond,” she warned.
→ See “Alders make case for firing Meeka Glass”
Blaska’s Bottom Line: We’re guessing that alders vote to fire the Independent Monitor, that the $40,000 request gets deferred until a later meeting, at which time alders will vote it down. But here’s the larger point: can this whole exercise in second-guessing Madison’s supposedly racist police …
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