I have several breaking news stories to report on in today’s
blog, which include news that our tribal council sold 41 FEMA trailers that
were supposed to come to LCO and aid in our housing shortages. This is a huge
story and the truth is just surfacing. But, first I’d like to talk about the
letter our tribal council sent out to the 229 people whose files were removed
from the clinic.
Apparently, our leadership has decided that the employee who
took the files did nothing wrong. Tribal Attorney Jason Stark said that what
this employee did was in the course of normal work procedure. This is what he
told me at the tribal office on Tuesday. It gets better…our leadership, in
their letter to the victims, is recommending that everyone file a complaint
against me with IHS because I had the list of names and decided to do the right
thing and inform those people their files were taken from the clinic. In the
letter, it states that I can be fined $50,000 to $1,000,000 per person.
Stark told me that the decision to send this particular
letter wasn’t made by the tribal council, but was actually sent out by the
HIPAA office and that it is now up to the Department of Justice prosecutors
whether to pursue these fines against me. The BS just gets deeper and deeper.
He’s flat out lying to me because Gordon Thayer said they
presented this letter to him to sign for tribal council authorization and he
wouldn’t sign it. I asked Stark about that and he said it was an earlier
version of the letter. Both Little Guy and Larry K. said the same thing, there
were multiple versions of this letter passed around, but that Stark was seeking
their signatures. Little Guy said the original letter he saw never mentioned
anything about filing complaints against the person who had the list of names.
Stark then claimed that it was a different version of the
letter that was sent out and had nothing to do with our tribal council. There
won’t be any type of charges against me and he knows this. The letter was sent
out by him and authorized by the tribal council. It is another election ploy to
try to make you all think that I’m the one who actually did something wrong
here. They continued to cover up the story, lied to us and even tried to keep
from firing the employee, who happens to be Norma Ross’ niece. The only reason
they eventually admitted anything happened and fired the employee was because I
wrote the past stories that I wrote. Now they are mad that I forced their hand.
Funny how they finally sent out a letter notifying the victims just days before
the election and in it, they recommend people file a complaint on me. If this
weren’t so serious a matter, it would be hysterical.
Our tribal attorneys have continuously given bad advice to
our leadership. This is one example, and later in this blog, I will show
another major example in the sales transaction of those FEMA trailers. Jason
Stark can’t even practice law in Wisconsin. When he travels outside the
reservation to represent our tribe, we have to pay for two attorneys to travel.
He has Courtney Allensworth, another one of our three attorneys, travel with
him so that she can actually represent the tribe.
Our tribal attorneys actually said in the statement released
by the tribe a few weeks ago in regards to these patient files that their
investigation was forwarded to the district attorney’s office in Hayward for
possible charges against me for having the list that was dropped off on my
doorstep. This leads me to another story about our district attorney, Bruce
Poquette. If you didn’t know this already, now you are being informed that he
is married to the daughter of Norma Ross. Yes, that’s right, he’s married to
Sara. My wife and I have been living with the concern that they could trump up
some ridiculous charges in this matter because I have been writing the truth
about Norma Ross and her activities highlighted in the audit report.
Here’s why this is a serious concern. It has to do with the
trash-letter that Paul Demain is passing around about me. He has a police
report from the city of Hayward that indicates I have a battery charge against
me prosecuted by Bruce Poquette, Norma Ross’s son-in-law.
Here’s the truth of the matter. My wife and I went out for a
couple of drinks and some dancing and we ended up at the River’s Edge Saloon.
We don’t get out much, but we should be able to as responsible adults, go out
occasionally. It’s hard to get these times out for each other when you have
four kids. So, here we are that night and not long after walking into the bar,
the owner and two other men attacked me (one of them a tribal member) and I
defended myself accordingly. I walked out of the bar and the police were
already outside waiting for me. My first thought was that I was set up.
Remember, I was already writing about our financial situation last fall. This
event happened in January. There was no physical injury to anyone and one
individual said he walked into a door. I was charged with disorderly conduct. I
went to court without an attorney because I planned to plead to a fine if I
could and accept responsibility for being there in the first place when I
shouldn’t have. The district attorney hands me the new report and the charges
had been upped to a battery.
I left the court in shock and soon found out that Poquette
is Norma Ross’ son-in-law. Aaah, it made sense then. I talked with several law
enforcement officers afterwards and they all agreed that normally, for a
battery charge to take place there must have been physical injury and the
officer on scene will take pictures, or a victim went to the hospital
afterwards with an injury they didn’t know about. None of this happened in this
case. They all agreed that the case was weak and it seemed that maybe I was
being targeted. It seemed like a set-up from start to finish. I know that if
someone was writing about my mother-in-law, I would want to do something about
it if I could.
This is an obvious conflict of interest but not only for me,
folks, but for our entire tribe. Any political foe of Norma Ross better hope
they don’t end up in the Sawyer County Court System, for he may target you for
a more serious crime or punishment. I didn’t batter anybody in my case but yet,
he thinks he actually has a case. Good luck. I’ve heard other things about this
district attorney as well, and it may come out eventually, and yes, it has to
do with our tribe. It’s a sad fact, but Norma Ross through her son-in-law can
actually pick and choose which of our members may go to jail. I say that any
and all tribal members in his court should ask for a conflict of interest!
The main reason that Paul Demain is handing out this letter
is that the bar owner of River’s Edge said to the police he kicked me out of
his bar for snorting cocaine in his bathroom. This is an absolute lie. Everyone
who knows me well knows that I don’t do any drugs. I haven’t even smoked weed
since 1998. There isn’t one person on this Rez who can step forward and say
they saw me do any cocaine or any other drug for that matter…EVER! Good luck
Paul Demain trying to produce that and other than that, all you have there is a
piece of hearsay from a worthless drugged out bar owner in Hayward, who was
wasted drunk in his bar starting fights. I even blew low enough that I could
legally drive when I took the breathalyzer that night. Like I said, my wife and
I were out for a few drinks and some social time, and weren’t even drunk. Now I
know to stay away from these types of atmosphere because there are many who are
determined to silence me anyway they can.
Speaking of silencing me, there is another story that I
won’t be silenced on because it’s another example of how little our tribal
leaders care about our people. Housing shortages is a major problem in our
community with some families having to wait years on the waiting lists. Many of
our people are homeless, some living in the woods and others shacking up with
family members. It’s a major problem here that our leadership likes to turn a
blind eye to. But, what is tragic beyond belief is when our leaders are given
41 homes to shelter our most needy families and they turn around and sell them!
You heard that right. Our tribe was awarded another batch of
FEMA trailers a few years ago, but, those trailers never showed up. Our tribe
stored them down in Oklahoma and other states instead of transporting them
here. Within the past year, Norma Ross and Little Guy signed the sales document,
a deal to sell them to Mobile Home dealers for a substantial amount of money. Some
of them were traded to pay the storage bills and then the rest were sold. Where
did the money go? How much did they net? These are questions I suggest you all
go up to the tribal office and start asking right away. This is just sick
beyond belief!
We have people waiting years on those housing lists. We have
people sleeping in the woods. We have people overcrowded in homes and yet, our
totally disconnected elitist tribal leaders thought it in the tribes best
interest to sell them. I’m sure that will be their excuse…we didn’t have the
money to transport them here and then how much would it have cost to get them
settled in.
Here’s what I say to that…It doesn’t matter how much the
cost, it would have been money well-spent to help our people who are suffering
out there. Look at it like this. It may have cost anywhere between $50,000 to
$100,000 to move them back to LCO, and then we would have to make them Northern
Zone Climate ready by insulating them. You’re looking at another $100,000. The
best choice at this point would have been to build a mobile home community
close to the water and sewer system of the Rez so you only have to run piping
to each home, so how much, another $100,000. For the price of $300,000, which
wouldn’t even build 6 tribal homes, we could have housed 41 families and they
believe this isn’t worth it? We had $220,000 in overdraft fees at Chippewa
Valley Bank last year for insufficient funds. That would have nearly paid for
the whole project. Also, these trailers sat for several years and FEMA
announced in the beginning that HUD made grant funds available for moving the
trailers. Over the course of several years, I’m sure we could have found grant
dollars to pay for the whole project.
Besides all that, if the council didn’t intend to get those
FEMA trailers back to LCO, then they should have refused accepting them. Those
were federal tax dollars that built them and they were given to LCO to help
with housing shortages, not to be sold for a profit. This is a serious matter
and an illegal one.
I asked Jason Stark about the tribe selling those FMEA
trailers and he said he had no comment. I then said it was illegal to sell them
and he said no it wasn’t. FEMA built 140,000 of those trailers for Hurricane
Katrina victims but couldn’t place them in New Orleans because of the flood
plain, so then FEMA began auctioning them off to recoup some of the taxpayer
dollars. The tribes across the country asked for some of them to help with
their severe housing shortages. FEMA decided to give a couple thousand trailers
to the tribes free of charge. The tribes just had to pay for moving them back
to their reservations. In our case, it was around $3,000 a trailer.
FEMA would have never given those trailers to us so that we
could sell them and make a profit. If FEMA wanted them sold to mobile home
dealers, they would have done it themselves, as they were doing. This is
another very serious matter and so I decided to call FEMA and ask them about
the trailers and how many were given to our tribe over each award (this one and
the previous awards that were handed out). I asked them for the serial numbers
on each trailer awarded to our tribe because this is public information due to
the fact that taxpayer dollars built each one of those trailers. They are
getting back to me on that in the next few days. With that information, we can
track the sale of all of these trailers through the DMV in the various states
they were held. These trailers were valued at $30,000 each. Several of them in
the first two batches didn’t end up in private tribal member ownership either,
but were sold to a real estate broker right here in Hayward. And someone
illegally profited on that deal as well.
There is so much more corruption and blatant disregard for
our people that I could go on and on. You’ve read all the past blogs and there
is a lot more that I haven’t even written about. It’s too bad that some people
try to say that what I’m doing is running a negative campaign. I just don’t
understand how shedding the truth on corruption is considered a negative
campaign. Our people deserve better treatment and deserve respect from our
council members, not mishandled grant funds, disappearing money, corrupt
construction contracts, and cronyism. This is not a negative campaign folks. A
negative campaign would be if I started calling them jerks and #@&... Or,
if I started writing about the other rumors I’m hearing about some of our
council members. I’m not doing that though, I’m sticking to stories that can
all be backed up and that I have documentation for. If my stories are so wrong,
then why hasn’t there been any public response claiming otherwise from our
leadership? It’s because I’m right and they have nothing to say.
Go back tribal members, read some of the blogs. Read the
audit report story. The auditors found 17 different findings of widespread
fraud and corruption all leading back to Norma Ross. This is not me saying this
folks. This is in black and white from a professional outside auditing firm.
This is no joke.
We simply can’t afford two more years of this leadership.
The same status quo has brought our tribe to its knees, so we must vote for
change, vote for candidates that oppose keeping things the same. I know there
are a couple dozen candidates that truly won’t support these leaders and their
corruption any longer. But, I also know there are a few candidates that support
the leadership and feel that there’s nothing wrong with the current road we’re
on. Four of those candidates are Jason Weaver, Jason Schlender, Brian Bisonette
and Gary “Little Guy” Clause.
Weaver posted on his Facebook page that he supports
Schlender, who is a supporter of the status quo. In the very next post, he
singled me out of 36 candidates to say that he doesn’t support me, although I’m
doing a great job for the tribe and that I’m an asset to the tribe. Tell me I’m
a nice guy while you push the knife deep into my back. Well, I know I must be
doing something right if he felt compelled to single me out of the crowd to say
he doesn’t support me. He has finally shown what he believes in for the future
of the tribe, all the while claiming he doesn’t support the leadership and
wants change. He is Mic Isham’s cousin after all. Weaver flat out told us
candidates at the BBQ last Saturday that he does not support Mic, claiming that
he hasn’t done anything for him, and yet he comes out supporting the most
Pro-Mic candidate (Schlender) and bashes the most Anti-Mic candidate (myself)
all in the same breath.
Win or lose my fellow tribal members, I promise this. I will
keep writing right through this election and I will help those candidates who
oppose this crooked regime!
See you at the polls on Saturday and good luck to all the
great candidates this year. Remember, you have four votes and I’d appreciate
one of those spots, a vote to Restore Native Pride! Vote Joe Morey.
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