At the city of Branson’s Alderman’s public Work Session on June 5, Alderwomen Sandra Williams said words to the effect that she disagreed with changing the time limit of speakers from ten to five minutes and that she would be making a statement against it when the issue came up at the Jun. 11 Branson Board of Alderman’s meeting but that she would be nice about it. Alderman Jack Purvis said words to the effect of, “As long as you’re nice about it.” Oh, that he had had the class and wisdom to stop there but, he demonstrated neither. Instead, Purvis went on to say, “Just don’t Dapprich us, OK.”
Pam Dapprich had been waging a tenacious and persistent battle seeking an apology from the city of Branson for the now infamous “Branson Namegate” letter of Sep. 15, 2006. That’s the letter sent to her by the city of Branson and signed by its attorney, Paul Link that tried to use a blend of coercion, deceit, bullying, and harassment to force Dapprich to drop the name “Branson” from the name of her not for profit organization, the “Branson Sports Club Inc.” She also fought to get the city to back off the heavy handed legal tactics it was using as it tried to develop a legal claim that it currently didn’t have in a misguided effort to control the future use of the name “Branson.”
It was a battle that received no support from the elected mayor or board that was then in power. However, it was a battle that highlighted very clearly, to the public, yet another example of how out of touch with the electorate the elected officials and the “Dodink Law” they failed to control was.
“Dodink Law” was a term the Ole Seagull used to categorize his opinion of the actions of the previous mayor and board of aldermen regarding their failure to exert control over the actions of the city of Branson’s administrator, Terry Dody and its attorney, Paul Link. Actions that, in the Ole Seagull’s opinion, and as evidenced very clearly in the Branson Namegate letter of Sep. 15, 2006, appeared to involve the use of intimidation and coercion to try to get businesses to give into the demands of the city or face the alternative of fighting its unlimited resources.
The good news for most people is that Dodink Law is a thing of the past because in the April election the voters took care of the portion of the problem they could by electing a new mayor and three new aldermen. The voters could not express their feeling toward Aldermen Purvis, Gass and Barker however because they will not be up for re-election until April of 2008. One of the first things the new administration did was reverse the position of the old administration regarding the Branson name change and issue a general apology for the letters that the city of Branson had sent out.
At the Jun. 11 meeting of the city of Branson’s board of aldermen, when the Ole Seagull asked Purvis why he had made such an inane and divisive statement regarding Dapprich his reply was, “I made that Statement Mr. Groman because Mrs. Dapprich has used all kinds of verbiage to describe us from snakes to other descriptive adjectives. That’s why I made that statement.”
It should be pointed out that Dapprich was not involved, even remotely, in what was being discussed at the time Purvis made his gratuitous statement and in all the appearances she made before the city counsel there is no record of Purvis ever asking the presiding officer to call her out of order for anything she said as permitted by the council’s decorum rules. To an Ole Seagull, Purvis’s statement about Dapprich appears to be a chauvinistic sexist Freudian slip back to the way he believes things used to be run under the previous administration, where a lot of the city’s business was conducted in closed executive session and behind closed doors.
Is it totally inappropriate to advise Purvis that the cloak of invisibility previously provided by the city’s inordinate use of closed sessions is not as wide as it used to be so he might want to consider exercising a tad more control over what he says in meetings? Before casting dispersions on Mrs. Dapprich maybe Purvis and those of like ilk should answer a paraphrase of the old adage, “What came first, the Dodink or the Dapprich?”
