Executive Directors of Main Street and their Boards

I moved to Aberdeen, Washington just over eight years ago. I arrived in Washington State by train on probably the fifth of September, 2017 and was back in housing on September 8th.

I went to the library and noticed flyers for local stuff that had "map" in the URL. I looked it up online and it led me to the website for Our Aberdeen, a very small, very local nonprofit economic development organization.

Their website said they had monthly meetings. It listed a date, time and place.

The address was a building more or less directly behind my apartment building on a side street relative to my address. It was an extremely short walk and I have no car.

I don't remember exactly what day I found this information, but almost certainly just a few short days before the listed regularly scheduled monthly meetings. It was their October meeting coming up.

I was newly off the street and wanting to get a life. I decided to check this out.

While homeless in Fresno, I sometimes looked up or tripped across public meetings that I would have liked to attend, but I never could figure out how to fit it into my life and it seemed pointless. And here I was organically tripping across information that some local organization doing something related to my interests had local meetings very much in walking distance of my humble abode.

So I went to the designated place on the designated date and time and waited for someone to show up and no one ever did. I passed the time watching their looping infomercial on a flat screen TV in the window about some other program.

I don't remember the details anymore, but it was about how Aberdeen Revitalization Movement was wanting to become a Main Street America program.

I went home and emailed Our Aberdeen and was told "Oh, the information on the website is out of date." and given a different address for where to go for the November meeting. I also made note of the date and time of the November meeting for Aberdeen Revitalization Movement, the organization actually at the address I had gone to that night. 

I also went to some public meeting at some local jobs organization of some sort and I also attended a city hall meeting. I was doing a personal survey of local public meetings that might interest me. 

Attending public meetings in walking distance of my apartment was a hobby I could afford as a dirt poor loser with no life, frequently too ill to try to do any freelance writing and looking for a means to constructively fill my time. There was no grander plan than that.

In early December, after being up all night, I decided to look up the date of the next meeting for Aberdeen Revitalization Movement and tripped across the job listing that had closed five days earlier but which Rick Moyer hadn't bothered to take down yet from their hideous website with a black and red goth atmosphere. I regret not making a copy of the job description.

Given that I had no car, the job description failed to say "Fuck you in particular. Driver's license REQUIRED." (unlike most jobs in the urban planning wheelhouse) and the office was practically on top of me, it was too much temptation to say "no" to and, silly me, I applied for the job thinking "This is one of the dumbest things I've ever done in life. There is ZERO hope they will take my application seriously though I seriously would LOVE to have this job!!!!"

It did end up being a super bad idea, but for completely different reasons than the ones I imagined.

They hired a local guy who graduated from the local high school and knew everyone in town. I strongly suspect he only applied because, unlike my naive idealistic fool self, he knew beforehand this was government pork barrel with no meaningful oversight from the city which would be defacto paying his salary to work for a nominal nonprofit economic development organization without having to in any way actually earn his keep.

This became such a a headache for me in part because there were TWO local nonprofit economic development organizations in town, the other one being Our Aberdeen.

Our Aberdeen had no physical office. It had a PO box and found free meeting space once a month in town and where they met floated around over the years because of that fact. 

It was run by a retired couple, Michael Dickerson and Sylvia Dickerson. As far as I know, neither took any salary of any kind.

For one on one meetings, I met with them at their home. When I bought domain names for Our Aberdeen, it was paid for using the personal credit card of Michael Dickerson because the organization had no credit card and probably no debit card and probably no checking account.

It was something of a fiction, a shell corporation so to speak. It was a front for the hobby of an elderly couple wanting to be taken seriously for their hobby of trying to improve the town they had moved to about twelve years earlier.

The first person I had contact with from Our Aberdeen was someone I liked and hit it off with. This gave me an overly optimistic positive opinion of the town.

I was deathly ill and didn't really want to get involved in small town politics. But some retired architect in town was shopping around his idea at EVERY organization in town that we should build a BOAT in Zelasko Park.

He was old enough to be senile and I felt certain that most people in town were hoping he would kick the bucket before anyone REALLY had to give him a hard NO about that dumb idea.

Please understand I was typically the youngest person in the room by a wide margin and I was in my fifties. So all these meetings were a bunch of old geezers trying to POLITELY avoid saying to anyone "Wow, that's so stupid and it would be super convenient if you drop dead before anyone takes your idiotic idea seriously. Because no one wants to tell you NO but we all absolutely HATE it."

So I sent this gal an email with lots of supporting citations to arm her with information so she could more effectively stand her ground and diplomatically say "Well, thanks for your participation but this IDEA doesn't hold water, no."

She was retiring from public participation, so without my permission she forwarded my email to Michael Dickerson and he replied to me and the retired architect in question. This made absolutely no difference whatsoever and the retired architect continued on his merry way promoting his boat idea all over town.

I hadn't been there long but this made me very leery of getting involved in small town politics.

That's how the Dickerson got hold of that email and that's part of why the Dickersons were trying desperately to figure out how to get me installed as Wil Russoul's replacement while Wil Russoul maneuvered to protect his job security.

Long story short, Our Aberdeen was accomplishing more in town with less bureaucratic BS on a shoestring budget than Main Street was and I had more insider information on Our Aberdeen and how they operated. This helped make it clear to me that it made no sense for the city to be paying Wil Russoul's salary out of city coffers.

Main Street had a physical office and full-time paid executive director and was all hot air. To this day, Aberdeen hasn't managed to get state certification for its local creative district, a project Wil Russoul initially promoted heavily, dropped the ball on at some point and then began actively sabotaging to sabotage ME as the Dickersons maneuvered to use that project to prove my worth to people in town.

So I QUIT rather than deal with Wil Russoul's obvious bad faith behavior pursued in the interest of covering Wil Russoul's ass at the expense of the town that he was being paid to look out for out of city coffers.

I imagine a lot of Main Street America executive directors are locals like Wil Russoul who are chatty and superficially talk a good game and know everyone in town but don't actually care about the welfare of the town and knew ahead of time it was a government pork barrel job with no meaningful oversight for which they were applying.

And that's exactly why they applied. A lot of them probably swaps tips at quarterly training sessions on how to dazzle locals with bullshit (while getting nothing done).

Their hiring board probably also knows this is a con job and they just want to feel important without having to pay the price involved in actually being important, making hard decisions and getting things done. I'm guessing a lot of boards are largely run by local women who have husbands who are well paid important people and they want the perks of looking important without the price you pay for being important.

So if you are in a small town with a local Main Street program, I don't suggest you bet on them welcoming the news that this program doesn't work and the town would be better off without it.

They probably know that and don't care. AT ALL.

And will try to defend their right to bleed the city of funds while cosplaying important big wigs.

So be prepared for a fight where these people don't go quietly even though that would actually be in the best interest of the town they nominally care so deeply about. 

If the people involved in the local Main Street program in Aberdeen were inclined to actually make decisions that improved the town, I would probably still live in Aberdeen, Washington and have an income as a part-time freelancer while thrilled to pieces to be able to eat at Panda Express and Chipotle once in a while.