The responses to the Diny ballot box investigation inquiry are underwhelming

Many essentially called the order overly broad

The Ethics Board is scheduled to meet today (Tuesday) as the Mayor Diny ballot box ethics investigation continues on into its sixth month.

The meeting materials for this meeting includes responses from other witnesses related to the matter.

That matter, for a means of recap, goes something like this. On a Sunday last September, Mayor Doug Diny removed an empty ballot box from the steps of city hall that was supposed to have been installed the following Monday by city staff. Diny moved that box to his office and it stayed there until the following Monday (at least that’s when The Wausonian confirmed it was back outside).

None of those facts about the sequence of events are in dispute; what is under dispute is whether or not those actions exceeded the mayor’s authority, resulting in an ethics violation.

This agenda now includes an item regarding whether or not those lodging the complaint and the mayor (and more importantly, their attorneys) can stipulate to the facts of the matter. That makes sense since the facts, as far as anyone could see, haven’t been in dispute; it’s the interpretation of those facts that are.

But last month the board decided to gather facts from more witnesses.

Based on the responses the board got, it didn’t learn much more than was already publicly known. The responses fall into three categories: A long email thread, a response of no contact, and an argument that the request was overly broad.

Those in the third category especially look surprisingly similar.

The most robust response

The city council President Lisa Rasmussen’s response was the most robust of any of the respondents. Rasmussen laid out a timeline of what happened that day from her perspective, including describing an email thread I became privy to prior to being the first outlet to break the story about the ballot box removal.