Mayor Stephens 1st Day In Office

After his 1st day in office as Mayor of Midlothian, there remains little doubt Mayor Stephens is facing more than just an uphill battle with what has been left behind, but whether or not there will be consistent communications from Village Hall informing the community of progress remains to be seen.

With a missed opportunity on Day 1 to swap out the old website rather than just deleting the April calendar on the home page, what really stands out is the continued retention of former Mayor Murawski’s name next to Mayor on the Government page.  Such an edit would have taken perhaps a 4 minute time investment and would have at least given the search engines something else to play with when it comes to how it crunches the term “Midlothian, Illinois” in order to produce results.

Such an oversight certainly doesn’t signal any real change is happening on the inside of Village Hall to the outside world and identifying who let this one slip by is a task for Stephens to tackle.  However, coming into office with a record of him trouncing his opponent at the polls certainly brought forth a flood of audience members to attend his swearing in ceremony on Wednesday, which indicates at least some level of ability to draw an audience to a Village Board meeting.

Whether or not this attendance level goes up or down could become a vital component in his pledge to revive the community base, at least from a residential perspective, but it will take more than one outpouring of community support at one Village Board Meeting to assure business owners that the slogan “Midlothian Mean Business” no longer symbolizes some sort of invisible threat of being hauled into the darkness by a badge or politician if they don’t follow the game plans as prescribed by the previous Mayor and his loyalists.

Without a website clearly stating as fact that Terry Stephens is the current Mayor of Midlothian, everyone who did not witness the event is left with only separate news reports that such a change actually happened on Wednesday.  These kinds of publication mismatches on the Internet makes it difficult to validate what is the truth and what is not, which is not in Stephens best interest, especially since there is continues to be a great deal of negativity growing even stronger around the behaviors of the former Mayor.

If Stephens doesn’t find ways to shore up the Village’s flanks within his first 100 days in office, the legal storms that have been brewing for years over the Village may very flood his administration so severely that no matter what Mayor Stephens says or does, his vision will be sunk before it can even leave the harbor.

It will all depends on how Stephens approaches the task of dismantling the once-virtually inpenetrable stonewall erected to keep the citizens out and the day to day business operations at such top secret levels, even the acronyms who deal with the Top of the Top Secrets would be impressed.  However, Midlothian is neither an acronym, nor do the Village Ordinances represent such a grave threat to the public that only a special code word such as FOIA and an appropriate pedigree can shake such information loose from the archives at Village Hall.

Whether or not the Mayor decides to rely on the most recent reason for not updating the site (lack of funds) will be but one of many notes of the symphony Stephens has promised us. So with time currently in his favor and community patience remaining steady, perhaps the Mayor’s 2nd day in office will generate at least one change so that the world can see the truth for themselves, which is that Thomas Murawski is no longer Mayor of Midlothian, no matter what the search engines might reflect to the contrary.