VILLAGE DIN

part 2 of 2
With Poundstone out of the picture in the 1989 election, longtime Greenwood resident Rollie Barnard was elected mayor. And for a couple of years things stayed quiet.

Seeing an opening when the Poundstone group lost power, Myrna Poticha had run again for council and been re-elected. However, Barnard was bound and determined that his tenure would be more placid than his predecessor's. Says current councilman Charlie Hazlehurst, "We didn't air our dirty laundry in public."

There were plenty of disagreements among the councilmembers, to be sure, but Barnard managed to keep a lid on most of them. Right up until last year. That's when the politically resurrected Poticha again went to war, this time against councilwoman Carol Johnson.

That the two would clash was perhaps inevitable. Johnson, a bright and vivacious woman who works part-time at a local school and once served as a neighborhood association president, is a longtime fan of Poundstone's. She represents the tract-home newcomers in the eastern district annexed by Poundstone in 1987, while Poticha serves voters in the more rural western section.

By the time her differences with Poticha came to light, however, Johnson had managed to alienate each and every one of her fellow councilmembers. She filed to run for mayor in February 1993, and, complains Barnard, began "getting her name on articles in [a local newspaper called] The Villager all the time."

Johnson, in fact, was given a column in The Villager titled "Council Corner," and began using the space as a forum to attack the other councilmembers.

For instance, Johnson took her colleagues to task over their handling of a request by a battered-women's shelter called Gateway to locate a safehouse in Greenwood Village. The group didn't want to go through the normal process for approval, says former councilman Bob Lembke, because it felt it was important that the location remain secret for reasons of security.

Normally, says Lembke, the city would publish the address of a proposed group home in the newspaper and hold a public hearing. What the council did instead was send notices to all the neighborhood association presidents in the city, inform them of Gateway's request and invite them to attend a hearing on the matter.

Johnson, however, decided the council was trying to pull a fast one on the residents of Greenwood Village. She wrote an article for The Villager stating that the council intended to sneak through an approval for the shelter without public input. "In that regard," says Lembke, "the woman lied. And unfortunately, that whipped up a lot of opposition." Johnson says she stands by her comments.

The next council meeting was packed with residents concerned for their safety and their property values. The shelter ultimately decided to locate elsewhere.

By that time the council had had its fill of Carol Johnson. On February 22 the seven other members drafted a resolution "censuring" Johnson for "repeatedly misrepresenting the actions of the City Council...repeatedly misrepresenting her actions as a member of the Council...and repeatedly making false and defamatory statements concerning the city staff, commissions and council." The document was signed and approved by every councilmember but Johnson.

Among the six complaints listed by councilmembers in the censure: that Johnson misrepresented the council's actions regarding the safehouse; that she had falsely accused city manager Dinah Lewis of improperly providing city employees with a sizable bonus (an expenditure that Johnson herself had voted to approve); and that she had falsely accused Poticha and Lewis of improperly funding and building a sound-attenuating wall in Poticha's district. (Johnson had repeatedly voted for that as well, though she later changed her vote.)

After the censure was read, says Johnson, Mayor Barnard reportedly came up to her in the council chambers and told her "the real meaning of the censure." According to Johnson, Barnard told her she was not to publish any more articles in The Villager. "And he said, `The council will keep the pressure on until you learn to play the game,'" Johnson claims. Barnard says Johnson's version of events is categorically untrue.

Johnson continued writing articles, she says now, because the council had "scapegoated me to the point that my projects weren't going well. I decided that the only way to do it was to publish them. That way, the public would be the arbiter and the force behind getting things done."

Johnson's Villager columns left the impression that she was the only person on council who was willing to listen to the public and to fight for them. And her words helped play on the fears surrounding the east-side/west-side rivalry.

Poticha and councilman Jim Underhill deny that there is an east/west schism in the city or on the council, saying talk of such a split is nothing more than "campaign rhetoric." But it's clear that residents in those areas perceive the city's future in different ways. "In the rural sector," says Barnard, "they really don't care a hoot about annexation. They don't want more people in their city, and they don't care anything about the commercial district. It's not a part of their way of life. They're busy raising animals and chickens." That part of town also has the most open space, and residents would like to see it bought up by the city and kept that way.