Commissioner Moran Brings Comic Relief To City Council Meeting
There is a point at which meaningless repetition takes on a comic theatre of the absurd dimension. Saratoga Springs Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran reached that threshold at the October 1, 2024, City Council meeting.
At this meeting Moran once again tried to get his fellow Council members to hire what would essentially amount to a personal attorney for his department.
Council members have repeatedly told Moran that the city already has an attorney and he cannot have his own. Even former Mayor Ron Kim rejected a similar request Moran made under the previous administration.
Fearless and oblivious to the absurdity of his fruitless demands, at the October 1, 2024, City Council meeting, Moran yet again submitted a contract for approval of an attorney on his agenda. This time, he added language about the attorney helping to review contracts, apparently hoping that no one on the Council would notice that the contract still also contained the original broad authority for attorneys to assist with “general legal matters.”
In the video, Moran waves a handful of papers, reminiscent of Joe McCarthy’s lists of alleged communists. Moran’s fist full of papers were allegedly city contracts that he said hadn’t been reviewed by the city attorneys. He did this knowing that his fellow Council members had been advised in the following email that every request he made to the city attorneys regarding contract review had been responded to on a timely basis.
His colleagues on the Council were clearly done taking his demands seriously. Their body language says it all. Even his loyal ally Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi failed to second his motion and pretended to be unaware of the vote as she shuffled her papers with her head down and failed to respond to the Mayor’s request for yeas and nays. Moran’s motion failed once again with his vote the only one in favor.
At one point, Dillon noticed that David Harper, the City Attorney, sitting in the audience, was chuckling. Harper is the nameless target of Moran’s fury in this video.