A new 11-member County Board of Commissioners who campaigned on transparency cleaned house behind closed doors in its first official meeting on Tuesday, and hired as County Administrator the failed pro-MAGA candidate John Gibbs.
Eight new members were elected and led by the evangelical activist group Ottawa Impact. They joined two incumbent Republicans and one Democrat. The new board was sworn in on January 3, immediately fired the current county administrator, and without a public interview hired Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate John Gibbs — who beat Rep. Peter Meijer in a primary, but lost to Democrat Hillary Scholten in Michigan’s 3rd District in the general election.
And they didn’t stop there.
- The board eliminated the county’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office, calling it “a divisive Marxist ideology and the platform of progressive Democrat socialists.”
- They changed the county’s vision statement from “Where You Belong” to “Where Freedom Rings.”
- They replaced the current corporate legal counsel with a legal group whose founder represented Karl Manke, a barber who defied lockdown orders against the Whitmer administration. They touted their new legal representative as “highly esteemed” and a “constitutional law firm” whose cases have been important to freedom.
- And they voted to hire a new health director, Nathaniel Kelly. Kelly is a mask protester, a critical race theory protestor, and part of a group of “professional experts in the field of industrial hygiene.”
Meet Nathaniel Kelly, proposed “Health Director” of Ottawa County
Kelly has master degrees of science in public health and occupational health from Columbia Southern University, an online university based in Orange Beach, Alabama.
Kelly has said that mask wearing and social distancing don’t help reduce the transmission of COVID-19, and denies that asymptomatic people can spread the virus.
“You would see me in hospitals unmasked talking to doctors, nurses, physicians,” he said.
Mr. Kelly is the sign language “expert” on the left in the video below.
Attorney General Dana Nessel is expected to conduct an extensive review into the actions of the Ottawa County Commission.
