Thanks, Now We Have More Questions
Part 2 of our Watchdog Series on the Talent Community Resource Center
City Council got wind of this here newsletter the other day thanks to one brave soul posting a link to the Community Resource Center piece in a Talent Facebook group. The response from Council members was swift, strange, and very messy. These folks do tend to get real frazzled when faced with anything resembling public criticism.
Maybe someday Talentonians will enjoy the kind of City leadership that assumes good intentions on the part of its constituents and responds to their questions with respect and curiosity instead of contempt and paranoid dismissal. For now though, it appears we have Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood serving as the City of Talent self-appointed spokesperson, which means we will continue to be treated like sinister plebeians a while longer.
Before digging in we should make something clear: Talent Council Watch is not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. We are asking questions about and alerting Council to what, based on publicly available evidence, looks to us like a lack of transparency around processes, decision-making and potential conflicts of interest. If we’re wrong, great. We will quite happily accept being wrong and we will correct the record and revise our analysis accordingly, but for us to do that it would at minimum need to be extremely clear exactly what we have said that is incorrect. Until then, we will keep asking questions. Anonymously.
Ok, now on to the TCW Report making its dramatic Facebook debut.
Councilor Collay was the first to reply to this post, predictably discrediting Talent Council Watch instead of engaging with the content. He accused us of “trying to draw conclusions and make assumptions” which…uh, yes? Guilty as charged Councilor.
But far more interesting than what he said is the fact that he deleted his comments shortly after posting them. When questioned about that by the original poster, we get Councilor Ana Byers telling us about how elected officials have been trained to adhere to extensive rules about discussing City business on social media. (More on that later).
It seemed at that point like maybe they had gotten a call from their lawyer and had to shut it all down, but no not quite, because Mayor Darby had not yet taken the opportunity to misuse the word misinformation and caution her subjects against ever reading anything about Talent that apparently doesn’t come from her own Facebook page, an official City press release, or a Talent News & Review article literally written by her staff. So of course she did that first, adding & deleting comments and ultimately revising one of them 19 different times over the course of a day but somehow still neglecting to edit into it any clarifying information on the topic, and then she skedaddled on outta there and changed the subject.
Once again, we are left with questions. In fact, we have more questions now than we did before, because she just made everything So. Much. Weirder.
It doesn’t seem like Council is super into us asking questions so there’s no real expectation that these will ever be sufficiently answered, but we’re gonna keep asking them anyway. I mean it’s not like the Talent News & Review is gonna do it!
First Question
Is the Mayor immune from the rules that limit what everyone else on Council is permitted to say about City business on social media? Because she doesn’t seem to have a problem with ‘inadvertently creating public records at a level that does not comply with all requirements’ on a pretty regular basis. Do these extensive rules that Councilor Byers refers to not apply to the Mayor and if not, why not? Did she not receive the same training everyone else did?
Second Question
What exactly does all this mean?
“Identifying local organizations who are already tenants in Talent buildings for input, is very far from signing a rental agreement at the resource center. And for the record, TBA might be happy to give input about rentals in Talent, because we pay rent (not make money) for our space, and we have already notified the City Manager a while back that TBA wants the old office back when Town Hall is repaired… TBA (still called Talent Chamber with the irs because they are slow) has been there in business since 2005 (not 2022) and it’s the best location for TBA.”
“TBA just recently remodeled the cute office at Town Hall, they will have to throw TBA out!”
“For the record, Access has been consulted as well. They are great community partners and previously occupied city space like all the rest. Still…no agreements have been signed with anyone. “
-Comments written by Mayor Darby in response to a Facebook post linking to this TCW Report on February 13, 2025.
This is how we understand these statements: TBA and other organizations are only being invited to “provide input” about the new building at this stage and they are being chosen to provide input only because they are tenants of the City. TBA is not seeking a space in the new building, as it already has an office in Town Hall and the City Manager was already informed that they will be keeping it that way. TBA is simply giving input about the new building because they are City tenants.
We welcome correction if we’ve misunderstood, but that is our genuine, honest-intentioned interpretation of what she was saying, which she would not expand on when asked.
We have never suggested that any agreements had been signed. That’s not the issue. The argument we actually made was that Manager Milliman’s department update at a Council meeting, along with a Facebook comment from the Mayor the same week in January, sure made it sound like the City had both identified and spoke with the initial groups (City tenants) as presumed candidates for building space before the public could give any input. Since we still don't know what the criteria for being able to rent a space will even be, if this is true then it would be in opposition to the very rules for tenant selection they told us they would be adhering to back in August. That was our entire thesis right there.
City Manager Gary Milliman’s Jan 15th Council meeting update:
“So we are starting to reach out to some of the community based organizations to determine their initial interest and possibly relocating there and we'll be talking to more next week and in the coming weeks.”
Mayor Darby’s January 12th comment on Facebook in response to a question about who would be invited to join the new building:
“Gary Milliman mentioned that he has approached current tenants but no agreements are made. RAC tenant since 2021, Jackson County Long Term Recovery Group tenant since 2002, Talent Business Alliance tenant since 2005, and Access/Food Project tenant since 2015?”
Note: According to their website the Jackson County Long Term Recovery Group has only existed since 2020, not 2002. We assume that was a simple typo on her part and was not misinformation intended to damage our community and tear us apart.
Third Question
Setting aside the fact the Milliman stated on the record that several groups had been identified and were met with as possible future tenants, not as consultants, it is unclear what kind of pertinent input the same groups could even provide as consultants if those groups are not assuming they will be offered a space in the building. (i.e. “Welcome to a tour of our sweet new building that we are not inviting you to move into. We asked you here because you have been a City tenant therefore you have insight into whether we should take down this wall in the building we will be renting out to tenants that are not you.”)
But here is what makes this whole situation weirder now than it was as week ago: the Mayor insisting that TBA doesn’t even want a new space. Okay, then why in the world would TBA be one of the groups asked to meet with the City, tour the building and provide input on…things? I mean at least if TBA were in the running as a tenant that would make sense, even if it’s premature at this early stage for anyone to be in the running. But if they don’t even want to move out of Town Hall, then we have to wonder about TBA providing input on any of this at all. Why would Talent Business Alliance - with our Mayor employed as its Executive Director and with several other Councilors financially connected to it, and which as a non-profit is not accountable to voters or subject to transparency laws - be providing input on important City decisions that on the surface have very little if anything to do with its mission of supporting small businesses, if not in its capacity as a future tenant?
Again, we are not making accusations of wrongdoing at this point. We are only trying to figure out why City tenants are already being invited to group tours of the vacant Resource Center building and how the TBA is intertwined with Council and City decision-making. And we are also letting our elected officials know that some things are looking kinda shady at the moment. If they are at all concerned about not adding to that perception any further, they might want to address it in an honest, public-facing way instead of trying to scare people away from even reading about it with stuff like this:
And on that note! A few words about this publication, or “anonymous blog” as Powerful Council Leaders are referring to it. We fully anticipated the anonymity pushback. To publish on Substack anonymously was a decision arrived at after a great deal of reflection on our priorities in relation to the risks involved. We knew our work would be dismissed by some because of the lacking byline, but we chose anonymity to protect ourselves against retaliation and personal attacks from people with direct and institutionally-backed power over our careers and day-to-day lives. Nothing for us to apologize for there. Holding power accountable does not require disclosing one’s identity, and what we lose in institutional validation by being anonymous we make up for in the freedom we have to expose the truth about what’s happening in those very institutions.
In response to the criticism that being anonymous while asking for transparency from City Council is hypocritical, there is a huge and fundamental difference between government accountability and personal privacy. Transparency requirements exist because the City government wields public power, controls taxpayer money, enforces laws, and makes decisions that affect entire communities. Private citizens - including journalists and local watchdog groups like this one - do not have remotely the same power nor the same obligations and cannot reasonably be held to the same standard as elected officials. This is something our Council seems to forget sometimes.
As far as what to call this thing you’re reading, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Grassroots/Citizen/Watchdog journalism or anonymous blogging. Personally I think it most comfortably lives in the “Investigative Commentary” space, a subtype of accountability journalism where private citizens working from outside of entrenched civic institutions examine evidence, connect the dots, and explore the broader implications of facts. There’s actually a well-established, corruption-exposing history of this kind of writing in the United States, we’re in good company. But whatever anyone chooses to call it, if this newsletter provides evidence that supports the assertion that the City Council is failing in its transparency obligations, officials dismissing the concerns only because they are raised anonymously is nothing but a distraction from the real questions in front of us.