How to stop Skip Hoagland from yelling at public meetings in Beaufort Co. | Opinion
I wasn’t on the brainstorming committee that came up with the idea for a Hilton Head Island councilman to publicly “out” a private citizen as “Calvin Who Doesn’t Own Anything in This Town,” so I can’t attest to how childish the rest of the team’s suggestions might have been.
But yikes.
I hate to think there could be a recently erased whiteboard that used to have “How to Silence Skip Hoagland” written at the top, with lines drawn through “Call him a doo-doo head,” “Let’s all hum when he starts talking” and “Everyone on the dais should repeat ‘I know you are, but what am I?’ in a monotone voice until Skip cries.”
I, for one, am very grateful that Councilman Tom Lennox didn’t come to Tuesday afternoon’s council meeting armed with a lighter and a brown paper lunch bag containing a “surprise from a dog.”
Actually, that might have been less stinky than what Lennox actually did — which is to say, Lennox appears to have investigated a private citizen and then used those findings in an attempt to humiliate or intimidate that citizen, who is a longtime critic of town leaders, because Lennox is among those who do not like that citizen’s opinions or the way the citizen expresses them.
Here’s what happened Tuesday:
Hoagland approached the podium in council chambers for his scheduled 3 minutes of public comment — during which Hoagland, as he always does, loudly and emphatically called for more transparency and accountability in government spending, particularly when it comes to the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce.
Right after that, Lennox announced he had some information for the record.
Hoagland’s real name is not Skip, he told the mayor and council. It is “Calvin C.”
And Calvin C. does not own a car or a house or any property at all in Beaufort County. Therefore, Lennox said, Calvin C. is misleading everyone when he includes himself among the “taxpayers” and “voters” he so often cites in his rants.
Some audience members applauded Lennox’s revelations.
Why? Maybe they already knew what Lennox had planned to do and were encouraged to come and watch it all go down.
Or maybe they just find Hoagland annoying — which would make sense, because Hoagland is, to his great delight, by design and of necessity, quite annoying.
But this doesn’t make him wrong.
For the past several years, Hoagland has fought — politically and legally — to bring attention to the murky waters surrounding Hilton Head’s, Bluffton’s and the county’s relationships with the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce, which is paid by all three — through its nonprofit arm — to market the area to potential money-spenders.
Hoagland sees himself as on a mission to uncover government corruption and force accountability for how every tax dollar is allocated and spent.
He is determined to use the rest of his God-given days to turn on the lights in every backroom in this county, where he says secret deals are struck daily between elected officials and their friends, with the civil servants they’ve bullied into complacency by their sides and an assist from a very particular lineup of lawyers, who tailor the rules to fit their game.
The targets of his ire, however, see all of this very differently.
Hoagland, they say, makes sloppy accusations and isn’t on some noble pursuit. He is instead — as it’s been told to me many times — trying to settle an old and personal score against the chamber, which reportedly declined to buy a very pricey domain name from Hoagland’s media company.
Hoagland denies this but says it’s true he has been angry (also disgusted) with the chamber for decades, starting in the 1990s when the chamber began competing for local advertising dollars with the area’s publishing companies, including his.
But never mind all that, he says. This is not about that. It’s about doing what is right by the public.
When it comes to delivering his message, however, Hoagland has a bit of a problem: He often drives his metaphorical Crook Catcher Mobile over the sidewalks, hand heavy on the horn, tearing up the landscaping as he goes.
He is given to hyperbolic speech. He can be insulting. He can be repetitive. His outrage has shrapnel, and sometimes it hits bystanders.
He says he’s working to tone all this down.
But in the meantime this has given elected leaders a false sense of exemption and justification when it comes to stifling his speech.
They have changed the rules for public comment. They have tried to have him removed from chambers by law enforcement despite his constitutional right to speak. They have sued him for defamation (using an obscene amount of taxpayer money to do so).
Again, this doesn’t make him wrong.
Here’s why I say this: In the past few years, whenever the subject of Skip Hoagland comes up, people roll their eyes and/or sigh heavily, but they almost to a person tell me, “He’s right, though.”
They say it quietly. They say it with a resigned chuckle. And “they” would surprise you because “they” includes some of the very elected officials who over the years have had the positional power to demand more in the way of transparency and accountability and even challenge the existing local relationships with the chamber.
The chamber has worked very hard to keep your eyes off its receipts and what it, quite unfortunately, refers to as its “secret sauce.”
The chamber has paid a lot of money to combat any effort to force its spending into the light (one must presume it’s a lot of money, of course, because one cannot see the receipts to verify this).
As such, the public has had to simply trust that the chamber isn’t using the money to supplement big salaries, fund lavish trips and host expensive parties and dinners.
In the meantime, elected leaders appear to be allowing the chamber to call the shots on accountability and possibly even wield a considerable amount of influence in town and county decisions. Why? Is it laziness? Corruption? Incompetence? The fear of not being liked by the “in crowd”? Or do they simply have that much confidence in the chamber and its abilities to bring in revenue and do its job well?
Whatever it is, these elected leaders have collectively seemed to prefer a cloak of secrecy to handing over what rightfully should be public information.
It would be nice, of course, if we could rely on the adage that no news is good news, but we’ve seen a lot of trickery, arrogance and serious entitlement as of late — all of it exposed only because of citizen watchdogs, including and often led by Hoagland, and reporters at the Packet and the Gazette.
On Tuesday, Lennox crossed a line, and in doing so he has further raised suspicions that something isn’t right here.
Why go to the trouble of pointing out that Hoagland doesn’t have a home or car here?
Are we going to start requiring that citizens own property before being allowed to address council?
What does that mean for civic-minded kids? What does it mean for all the other aging county residents whose estate planning has included “take your name off the property to make the probate process less punishing”?
What does it mean for a town that relies on visitors?
What does it mean for poor people? What does it mean for those coveted millennials that Hilton Head says it wants so badly?
Hoagland might not own property in this county, but he is undeniably a member of this community.
Elected leaders might not like his voice.
But they still need to listen.
