Ward 1, Come Pick Up Greg Stuchell. He’s Drunk On Power.

Greg Stuchell is having a no good, very bad week.

At last night’s city council meeting, Stuchell, alongside Tony Vear, attempted to ram through an anti-abortion ordinance — or, as I prefer to call it, a forced birth ordinance — with no notification to the general public until the meeting packet was released on the Thursday prior.  This came completely out of nowhere.  Vear — son of Bud Vear, the president of Hillsdale County Right to Life — and Stuchell — husband of Heather Tritchka, Hillsdale County Right to Life vice-president — coordinated this assault on body autonomy quickly and under the radar, specifically because they knew that if the broader public had time to prepare for it, it would fail outright.

You can read my comments to the council at that meeting here.

Now, Tony Vear is one thing.  He’s entirely in the wrong here, but he pretty much took the back seat at the council meeting, because this isn’t actually his pet project.  He put his name on it to deflect from the people who are actually behind it.

This is Heather Tritchka’s pet project, and thus, this is Greg Stuchell’s pet project. It was known ahead of the meeting that Mark Lee Dickson, the sleazeball lobbyist who the forced-birthers flew in from Texas to produce this three-ring circus, was staying at Stuchell and Tritchka’s home through AirBnB. It was Stuchell and Tritchka’s social circle who signed their petition and showed up to back them at the city council meeting. It was Stuchell who spoke the most passionately about the topic out of anyone behind the council dais.

So why did Greg Stuchell not put his name on it?  I can only assume to avoid the (accurate) perception of a conflict of interest.  Trying to sneak this past the public’s notice wasn’t enough, he had to make it look like it was on the up-and-up if it were to pass.

Luckily, it didn’t fool anyone.

Neither did his protestations that he wasn’t trying to do this under the cloak of darkness. His denials didn’t even pass the sniff test. He was there when Robert Socha got his wrist slapped for doing the exact same thing. He’s been a council member since 2018. He knows how the process works; he’s not ignorant of it. He genuinely thought he would get away with it… because, as I said in my public comment, it has worked in the past, and it’s worked in the past because the voters of the City of Hillsdale — and Hillsdale County as a whole — are largely apathetic. I’ve railed against that problem for years. Thankfully, more people are starting to get active and involved, and their participation at least delayed the crisis last night. I can only hope that trend continues.

Stuchell was attempting to pass off the language of the ordinance as “confusing or misunderstanding” [sic] because it had to be (for reasons he didn’t actually explain), and defending it because, he claimed, “it has gone to court and it has stood.”  Of course, we know that to be a lie, as well: the case he was referring to, which took place in Texas, was dismissed because, as City Attorney Tom Thompson pointed out (and as was noted even in the article Dickson had been sharing as his claim to fame), the judge basically punted and said that because the ordinance was toothless and unenforceable, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood had no claim to injury.  Thompson also noted a difference in state laws that would mean what worked in Texas likely wouldn’t work here.

You would think Stuchell should have realized that.

The sad fact is that the document that was included in the council packet is NOT confusing or hard to understand.  I read it.  I know exactly what it would do.  I know exactly what it would not do.  I know exactly what it is intended to do, since it can’t actually do anything without Roe v. Wade being overturned.  And sure, I’m a pretty smart cookie.  I’m interested and invested in government and the justice system, so these are skills and information that I’ve learned over the course of many years.  But it doesn’t take someone with my level of intelligence, knowledge, or reading comprehension skills to read and understand the words on the page.  No offense intended, but I know there are people who DON’T have my level of intelligence, knowledge, or reading comprehension skills who read the proposed ordinance and understood exactly what it said with absolutely no problems whatsoever.  There was no confusion or misunderstanding about the text of the proposed ordinance in that room.  None.  At all.

…Except on the part of one Greg Stuchell, who, as he rambled on, made THIS jaw-dropping assertion:

Our job isn’t to dissect legalese.  That’s the lawyers’ and the judges’ job to do.  We just have to make sure we’ve got the right support behind it, and we do.  We do.

Wow. Just… WOW.  A sitting city council member, claiming that he shouldn’t have to understand an ordinance before it passes.  Shades of Nancy Pelosi there, who people like Stuchell (correctly) criticized for YEARS after she said “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”  Understanding the process, knowing how to read legalese, and knowing what’s in a proposal BEFORE it passes is EXACTLY the job of a legislator at ANY level.

Greg Stuchell fails all three job requirements.  That alone should disqualify him.

But that’s not the only problem he presents for the voters of Ward 1.

I mentioned in my public comment that Stuchell had verbally attacked a member of the public at a recent TIFA board meeting.  That person was Jack McClain, who was voicing concerns about how the TIFA board has been going about their business.  According to McClain’s comments at the July 19th city council meeting, Stuchell directly said to him, “Jack, shut up; nobody wants to hear what you’ve got to say.”

Is that any way for an elected official to treat a member of the public?  Stuchell may disagree with McClain all he wants, but that is, in its very essence and by definition, an attempted First Amendment violation.

Stuchell either learned better from that moment or knew that he couldn’t get away with such brazen behavior in front of the full city council, because last night, he was more quiet in directing his rage toward me. If you watch the city’s video of the meeting, you’ll see he had all sorts of snide reactions to my first public comment.

But it was my second public comment that made him obviously uncomfortable, and he knew that his smug arrogance wasn’t going to save him.  Prior to my reaching the podium, he can quietly be heard saying “Oh God.  Dumbass.”  Listen closely.

Then, as I leave, a bit more clearly, you can hear Bill Zeiser say “Put that in the ‘rant’ file,” to which Stuchell laughingly agrees.

EDIT: I didn’t initially catch it, but It’s been brought to my attention that someone also called me a “dick” prior to Zeiser’s comment.  Given the audio level and how the microphones were behaving that night, it sounds like that was likely Zeiser as well.  But that’s just my best guess; I’ve only been working with audio at the professional level for 28 years, so how would I know?

Zeiser is his own topic altogether.  That’s neither here nor there.  The point is, he turned to comfort Stuchell by demeaning me because he knew Stuchell felt the sting of being called on the carpet.

Now, I’m a big boy.  I don’t give a damn what Stuchell or anyone else thinks of me.  On a purely personal level, my feelings aren’t hurt in the slightest.  I slept just fine last night knowing I had spoken the truth.

I doubt Stuchell did, because at the end of the night, he had to agree to move the matter to the Operations and Governance Committee in the vain hope of quelling the backlash against his subterfuge.

So, Ward 1, THIS is the person whom you elected to represent you to the rest of the city: a lying, conniving, smug, arrogant, elitist authoritarian who thinks you’re too stupid to understand a proposed city ordinance, yet at the same time, TRIED and FAILED to hide it from you, and who uses his position as a city official to mock, berate, and at least attempt to silence those who he doesn’t like.

This is Greg Stuchell, and he’s reflecting quite poorly upon you.

FOR THE RECORD: There has been some erroneous attribution to Stuchell of another comment that was overheard in the council chamber after I left the podium the second time, and I want to correct that.  My back was turned at the time, but I clearly heard it coming from behind me.  I didn’t know who it was, but the video shows that it clearly was not Stuchell and, as I had first guessed, was most likely someone in the gallery.

That comment, which was not picked up clearly on either the city’s video or any others I’ve seen, was “Well, he didn’t make any friends.”

My response to that is simple: I wasn’t there to make friends, I was there to stand up for what’s right.  Sometimes, that makes you more enemies than friends.  That’s why so few people do it.  It’s my hope that, by being an example, more people will be encouraged to speak out against the wrongdoing in this area.  Even if I am rushed to cut two minutes of a five-minute speech.