FRIDAY QUESTION

The town Board of Commissioners has scheduled a closed session meeting for Monday, July 14 at 7 p.m. It was scheduled after the third unsuccessful round of mediation talks earlier this week.

So FRIDAY QUESTION: WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY ARE GOING TO DISCUSS?

If it’s about updating those who stayed back, they’ve been discussing it for a couple of years now, and three times (“thrice” if you prefer) they have failed to reach a settlement agreement with Crowder, et al. Just like with all the summary recitations for the closed sessions, all they have to say to anyone to update them on the negotiations is “No action was taken.” That is already written down, somewhere. Boom! We’re all updated! This Monday night off for everybody!

Given the string of closed-session meetings for whatever they have been stringing together closed-session meetings for lately, it seems like they could have just had more people make the trip and save the trouble. If you weren’t on the “allowed to accept a settlement” team three times before, an update might be superfluous or even moot anyway.

What are they not discussing?
They (probably) won’t be discussing money numbers, higher or lower.
It seems unfathomable that they are going to spend another evening in a private, attorney-client-privileged meeting trying to cobble together a number that is higher than any thrice-previously-denied, thrice-unacceptable, thrice-unsettled-upon number.
Discussing a lower number that Crowder, et al, have already denied doesn’t sound like it would be a good way to spend a Monday evening either, though, or end up in a positive outcome for the town. If there were a number that might be acceptable on July 14, you’d think it would have been acceptable on July 9.

What might they be discussing?
Anything, who knows? Hopefully it does not include settling or numbers, though. It must be something that requires attorney-client privilege, and necessitates updating people on July 14 for a trial that’s only a couple months off, when their presence wasn’t necessary on July 9.
It also might involve something that was quashed in the past. Again, who knows?

The best hope, overall
It seems like the best thing we can hope for at this Monday night special-called, all-closed-session meeting would be that all the commissioners get together and update whoever missed out on the 9th, then chestbump each other like professional wrasslers, psyche each other up, watch all of the Rocky movies

and the end of Thornton Melon’s oral exams in “Back to School”

so that in the future, say, in a trial or what have you, they will remember “we don’t take (less than the town deserves) from no one!”

And then, Gladiator. “My name is Hope Mills Town Board of Commissioner. Citizen of a town whose expensive dam failed. Elected representative of every citizen in that town. And I will have my vengeance, in this life, or the next.”