The Livingston County Board of Commissioners is expected to adopt a 2026-2030 Strategic Plan at its next meeting, some points of which are raising eyebrows as being too political, but we won’t talk about them in this particular column.
While there are things in that plan that taxpayers should know about, for this piece we will focus solely on the goal in the plan that affects us directly.
Allow me to explain: Our Dear Leaders hope to adopt on April 27 a strategic plan that includes a goal to “reduce reliance on biased media outlets for communicating county news,” and expand the use of “neutral, diverse, and direct communication channels.”
(Are all the media outlets in Livingston County biased? Or is there one or two that most bother the Dear Leaders? And what the heck are “neutral, diverse, and direct communication channels”?)
If the plan passes, April 27 in Livingston County will be forever known as Festivus of the Dear Leaders, a holiday celebrated by a parade of emergency vehicles traveling Grand River Avenue east to west (or left to right if you’re facing south) from Brighton to Fowlerville. The parade, at which attendance of county residents will be mandatory, will culminate with an intense display of fireworks donated by grateful county vendors thrilled to pay their respects to the Dear Leaders; additionally, there will be the firing of many guns into the air by the Dear Leaders CPL 2nd Amendment Club at the Fowlerville Fairgrounds.
To sidestep the traditional — and BIASED — media outlets in Livingston County, the Board of Dear Leaders has come up with a plan. Given that the median age of our Dear Leaders is 75, they will rely mainly on their whippersnapper grandchildren to show them how Facebook works.
Using Facebook exclusively to inform taxpayers is both an homage to the Meta data center being pitched for Howell Township, as well as a darn brilliant idea: We all know how “neutral, diverse, and direct” communication is on Facebook, and we look forward to joining our Dear Leaders as they bask in all those thumbs up, and soak up the constructive and illuminating banter of all those well-informed commenters.
Our Dear Leaders are right: Livingston County’s taxpayers need to know only what the Dear Leaders deem is relevant and appropriate. There shall no longer be reasons to have opinions different from those of the Dear Leaders.
As the longest serving journalist at one of the “biased” media outlets, please consider this opinion piece my very last.
I am waving my white flag.
I give up.
I’ve seen the light.
Our Dear Leaders are always, always right, and should never, ever be questioned.
So correct and righteous is our Board of Dear Leaders that my fellow biased media outlets — you all know who you are — will surely join me in no longer reporting on what the Dear Leaders do.
How quaint that we journalists once thought we were an important piece of the democracy puzzle, that our work was so valued that it was actually protected under the First Amendment. Forget all that crap! We’ve seen the light.
The Board of Dear Leaders, of course, is right: From here on in, we pledge our allegiance to each and every Dear Leader on the county board, and we will immediately cease informing Livingston County’s taxpayers about what our elected officials do; instead, we will print verbatim ever single press release they deem suitable for public consumption.
Hail, Dear Leaders! We are grateful for this opportunity to fall in line and help Make Livingston County Great Again!
No longer will we report on the Board of Dear Leaders. We apologize for our past transgressions, like sharing a community opinion about Dear Leader Nakagiri’s kerfuffle with Livingston County’s Veterans Administration (click here for that). We apologize for once reporting on the public meltdown of now-chair of the Dear Leaders Nick Fiani (a Republican) screaming at a couple of local Democrats that they don’t deserve to live in Livingston County.
We concede that Livingston County taxpayers have no right to know how their hard-earned money is being spent by our Dear Leaders. Whether it’s meddling in the county court system, playing political hardball by using the voting records of applicants for appointed positions, refusing to appoint Democrats to boards, spending hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on legal fees on a case that it never had a chance of winning, insulting one of Livingston County’s judges on his retirement, to meddling in the literal management of shit, we will only print what the Dear Leaders tell us.
We apologize for believing the public deserves to know how the Board of Dear Leaders functions, how it spends our tax dollars, and how it treats the community. We also apologize for having opinions different from those of our Dear Leaders. From now on, we bow and scrape only to them.
• You can read the proposed Livingston County Board of Commissioners Strategic Plan 2026-2030 by clicking here.
• If you appreciate independent local news and opinions, show your support of The Livingston Post by clicking here.
