BY STACY SOBOTKA
and
LARRY SOBCZAK
EDITOR
Hundreds of Bruce Township residents showed up to the township hall on July 25 for a special meeting of the board of trustees only to find out it was cancelled.
The special meeting was scheduled to allow Bruce Township Clerk Susan Brockmann to resign her elected position and to appoint her as township manager, a newly created position.
Township manager is a position similar to a city manager who oversees day-to-day administrative duties in a community. Michigan state law allows for township supervisors to appoint a township manager.
The meeting was officially cancelled at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning with the “lack of agenda items” as the given reason for the cancellation.
Instead of a meeting, Bruce Township residents gathered outside the township hall to discuss petitions to recall Brockmann, Supervisor Richard Cory, Trustee Mark Falker and Trustee Paul Okoniewski.
Residents were hoping that by 7 p.m. some members of the board of trustees would show up so they could ask questions and to express their opinions.
Only Bruce Township Treasurer Deborah Obrecht showed up at the township hall.
“I was there to listen to concerns about the township manager position and to confirm to the residents the meeting was cancelled,” Obrecht said. “I had to unlock the township hall to show the first people to arrive that there was not a meeting taking place in the meeting room.”
Several Bruce Township residents began collecting names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of people willing to sign an official recall petition once it is filed with and approved by the Macomb County Election Commission.
By 7:15 p.m. more than 100 names were listed for the recall support and by the time the last residents had left the hall an hour or more later, the number had doubled according to Obrecht.
“The whole thing was shady, from giving the residents five business days of notice of their plan to make a major change in how the government would operate, to creating a sweet deal package for one’s self prior to the taxpayers even knowing about it,” said Bruce Township resident Debi Martone who was heading up the recall campaign. “They were preying on the taxpayers and to me that is totally unacceptable.”
In a contract submitted to the township board before the meeting was cancelled, Brockmann proposed that her yearly salary would be $77,792, the same amount as she is currently paid as clerk.
In addition, Brockmann’s contract would have include a possibility of up to 54 paid days off per year including 28 vacation days, 12 sick days and three personal days as well as government holidays.
Her contract stated that she would work 40 hours per week however she could work them outside of the township’s normal business hours.
Her contract also would have included the full range of benefits including health insurance, dental insurance and life insurance. The township would have made a yearly pension contribution up to 16 percent of her wages.
The proposed contract would expire Nov. 30, 2020.
Brockmann was first elected township clerk in 2008 and was reelected in 2012 and 2016.
A few days after her 2016 reelection, it was revealed that Brockmann was charged with “super-drunk” driving for an incident that occurred at 3 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016 in the township hall parking lot. Brockmann had crashed her automobile into a Michigan State Police Trooper’s patrol car that was responding to the burglar alarm at the township hall.
Brockmann never volunteered information about her arrest.
Brockmann was sentenced to 10 months of probation, a $450 fine and 25 hours of community service in 2017.
Residents who were at the township hall on July 25 hope the recall process will go quickly and be placed on the next possible election ballot.
As of last week, the official recall petition still needed to be drawn up and submitted to the Macomb County Election Commission for approval.
If approved, petition circulators would have 40 days to collect enough signatures of registered voters to trigger a recall election according to election officials.
The minimum number of signatures required is 25 percent of the township residents that voted in the November 2014 gubernatorial election according to state law.
According to the Michigan Secretary of State, if the recall petition contains the minimum number of valid signatures required, the election official with whom the recall petition was filed must call a special election to be conducted on the next regular election date that meets the following criteria:
1) is at least 95 days after the date the recall petition was filed,
2) and falls on the May or November regular election date.
According to the secretary of state, legislative changes took effect in late 2012 essentially changed the concept of a recall election from a two-election process (if the recall was successful) to combining the concepts of a recall election and a special election to fill the possible resulting vacancy.
That is, there is now a single recall election to fill the partial (remaining) term of office for the official subject to the recall, with the incumbent automatically made a candidate in the election unless he/she withdraws within 10 days after the filing of the recall petition.
There is one election and the candidate who receives the highest vote total becomes the elected candidate according to the secretary of state.
Caroleen Benner was one of the many residents who offered her support for the recall petitions.
“It’s absolutely horrible. To have this corruption in this little township of Bruce, it’s got to stop. It’s all connected, and it’s got to stop and we’ve got to start clean. We need new faces,” she said.
