OPINION | We were wrong — Sucette Harbor was a good thing after all

City Attorney, Planning Director were right

Judge needs to make council approve Sucette Harbor

Democrocy cannot survive if people are running around saying what they think

Boy, did we get this one wrong. How could we have been so stupid.

We humbly offer the supporters of Sucette Harbor and the downtrodden people of Mandeville who desperately need jobs as janitors and maids but were afraid to speak up, a huge apology.

And to you people out there who attempted to tear a hole in the very fabric of democracy by lobbying your council members and mayor, by showing up to council meetings and speaking out, by having the nerve and audacity to clap and disrupt the town square with fascist opinions, you should have just shut the hell up and let the adults run things. You are stupid and your money and investments in your homes do not entitle you to counterproductive opinions.

I cannot believe you swept me up in your talk of conservation and lofty faux platitudes about freedom, democracy, and keeping the Mandeville lakefront idyllic. This ain’t the olden-dude times of the Founding Fathers. No one’s invading ‘Merica last time I checked.

Your outdated, outmoded and downright stuffy attitudes violated the safe space the good people from Woodward Interests should have been afforded. They should have felt protected and valued when appearing at City Council meetings in their efforts to make sure that certain aloof council members did the job they were elected to do — which is to vote how the City Attorney and Planning Director tell them.

Instead, we literally had amendments being offered directly by council members themselves during public council meetings, without getting them approved, vetted, filtered, or scrutinized by the City Attorney and Planning Director in advance, in private, behind closed doors.

Were they not concerned with the chaos and lawsuits that were bound to ensue when the will of the people made it to a vote by their duly elected representatives in a public, open meeting?

That’s not the ‘Merica I want to live in.

Everyone flipped out over the beautiful conceptual site plan, nitpicking and scrutinizing every tiny detail. But hello people… It’s just “conceptual.” Once approved, it could have morphed into whatever was needed to best serve the 40,000-plus voters who wanted it. Think of the possibilities and the amenities they could have crammed into it. Who knows, we might have finally gotten a check-cashing store at the lakefront.

What a shame that it is taking a lawsuit by Woodward Interests in order to protect the rights of the City Attorney and Planning Director to run the city how they see fit. How do we ever hope to get a casino built in Port Marigny if we can’t even get a hotel-events-center-old-dude-apartments-restaurant-check-cashing-place-maybe-and-marina built next door?

Who do we think we are? And what were these out-of-touch council members thinking? If the Planning Director says that multi-family residential really means commercial and not residential, then so be it. Everyone knows that whatever the Planning Directors says is law, regardless of whatever the hell the City Charter or the CLURO Articles 7.5.15.5 or 7.7 say.

The City Charter’s CLURO is a living, breathing document whose meaning is ever-changing and can only be interpreted by the Planning Director. It’s not easy to look into that crystal ball and keep the goalposts moving. Who are these council members to question anything the Planning Director says… anything at all… ever… in this lifetime… or the next.

Robert’s Rules of Order. Hah! Talk about stale. What good are rules if they stand in the way of progress? Those “rules” were written in the late 1800s by a relative of actual slave owners. Yeah, bet ya’ didn’t know that! It’s on the internet so it must be true.

And these so-called “citizens” — meeting with their council member at a publicly advertised secret outdoor meeting at a local pizzeria, that anyone could have attended, and, that outspoken proponents of the project did indeed attend and speak at — took the cake. Where were the Mandeville Police to break up such brazen acts of disinformation? Maybe being spread-eagle on the hood of a police cruiser would have taught some of these local ruffians a lesson or two about the true cost of freedom in Mandeville.

As Max Boot — who was born in Communist Russia by the way — once said, “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”

Well, the same should go for Mandeville too. Those old Soviets knew a thing or two about efficient democracy.

Thankfully we had one councilman at large who tried to reign in the lies with a brilliant social-media-safe-speech resolution that could have made these ne’er-do-wells mouthing off on Facebook, Nextdoor and in “small group discussions” answerable to City Council justice by “asking” them to apologize. But noooooooooo. The loud-mouths laughed at, ridiculed, clapped, and forced him to withdraw the proposal in utter shame.

They claimed it was meant to intimidate and quell dissent and would have violated their “rights.” But in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger during the Covid-19 lockdown: “Screw your freedom!”

Yes, screw your freedom. It doesn’t outweigh the need for low-wage jobs that could have been created by a hotel-events-center-old-dude-apartments-restaurant-check-cashing-place-maybe-and-marina in the middle of existing “commercial” housing.

We pray the court will force the City Council — under the threat of arrest or double secret probation — to re-vote in favor of Sucette Harbor, bar the mayor from using his veto power, and place a gag order on the citizens of Mandeville from saying, writing or thinking anything negative about Sucette Harbor in public, in private or in “small group discussions,” so help them God.

And if any of those council members complain that it’s not fair, then hopefully the judge will say what Dean Vernon Wormer said in Animal House: “I’ll tell you what’s fair and what’s not!”

The judge should let these council members know that on all future ordinances they are to check with the City Attorney and Planning Director before casting their votes.

You can’t let freedom just… ring.

The very existence of democracy is at stake. We cannot afford to have a city council running around voting on things as they see fit. It’s unna-Merican.

Pray the judge does the right thing and gives us the hotel-events-center-old-dude-apartments-restaurant-check-cashing-place-maybe-and-marina that Mandeville desperately needs.

‘Lighten up Francis.’ The preceding was satire. Funnier to some than to others, I bet.

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