Since her appointment to the Ward 2 seat by Mayor Marlin, Julie Laut has rarely provided substantive response or input on any subject, and almost never does so when constituents contact her directly.  I have personally emailed Laut on numerous issues, and rarely receive a response.  When I have received a response, it tends to be little more than “thanks for your input”.  I’ve spoken to a number of other people who have received the same treatment.

It was curious to me then, that Laut immediately jumped in when a resident emailed the Mayor and Council expressing their concern about the City Clerk, Phyllis Clark.  At the October 6^th City Council meeting (which Laut did not attend), Clark very strangely robbed the floor from Council member Jared Miller to deliver an inappropriate and embarrassing monologue full or erroneous claims (article here).

A resident emailed the Mayor and Council about this incident and Laut seemed to find this a convenient moment to do some moral grandstanding.  This is a technique that is popular on social media platforms wherein the speaker acts in a way that isn’t responsive at all to the actual subject matter, but means to establish how noticeably moral and upstanding they are by condemning someone else.

The moral grandstanding technique may be all the rage on shallow and idiotic social media platforms like Twitter, but it just isn’t meaningful among useful people.

Here is the full email chain between Laut and the concerned resident; you be the judge (click for full 2-page PDF):

And here is the video of Phyllis Clark’s interruption of the October 5th Urbana City Council meeting: