When it comes to dysfunction, Congress has nothing on Nelsonville City Council. Circus, soap opera, dumpster fire, s**tshow — call it what you will, what’s been happening in Nelsonville is far from governance.
Over the weekend, area news media and current and former officials had ringside seats for an exchange of email volleys between Rita Nguyen and public information officer Dan Pfeiffer that hinged on whether Nguyen is still president of city council and thus is authorized to schedule special meetings, and if Matthew Voltini or Jonathan Robe is the city’s attorney and thus able to rule if a meeting is or is not legal.
It’s the latest show in an expensive, long-running circus that has overstayed its welcome.
The council’s multiple attempts to remove Greg Smith must have cost the city upwards of $100,000. Last month, Smith accepted a $70,000 settlement for four of the six lawsuits he’d filed against the city since 2021. He promptly resigned from council, having been re-elected to council in November 2023. Now the council is in a row over who replaces him.
The council is driven by faction, with blocs of members voting against one another, seemingly out of spite. Place your bets on how long Smith’s replacement — or any member of council — sticks around. Whenever there’s a disagreement, it seems, somebody yells “I quit!” only to turn around and say, “I didn’t mean it.”
At least the city manager position appears to be stable: Five months in, Tom Camgeni has lasted longer in the job than anyone else since Scott Frank resigned a little more than a year ago in the midst of a plea deal with the Athens County Prosecutor’s Office.
Five months, y’all.
Nelsonville isn’t the first Athens County town to experience political turmoil. Things got so bad in Chauncey that in 2008, then-Prosecutor Dave Warren threatened to ask the state to dissolve the village. While village council and the mayor fought, the village’s flood insurance lapsed, leaving more than 71 property owners at risk of losing everything when the Hocking River next inundated the town.
A decade-and-a-half later, Chauncey’s government seems to work just fine, which shows that political circuses can, and do, move on. It’s time for the Nelsonville Big Top to come down so everybody can get back to the real work of governing.
