I had forgotten about Ingham Sheriff Gene Wriggelsworth’s comments regarding the state’s medical marijuana law -- until reminded of them in this morning’s LSJ.
I get that he doesn’t like what the voters did, in decisive fashion, in 2008. But, as a public servant, is it proper behavior for him to be disparaging the decisions and judgment of those who pay his salary? (“Ingham County Sheriff Gene Wriggelsworth, whose department handles law enforcement in the county, has called the club ‘a joke.’ ... ‘This is exactly what law enforcement said would happen when they passed the (medical marijuana ballot measure),’ he said in February. ‘This has nothing to do with medicinal marijuana. This has to do with getting high.’”)
I get that he doesn’t like what the voters did, in decisive fashion, in 2008. But, as a public servant, is it proper behavior for him to be disparaging the decisions and judgment of those who pay his salary? (“Ingham County Sheriff Gene Wriggelsworth, whose department handles law enforcement in the county, has called the club ‘a joke.’ ... ‘This is exactly what law enforcement said would happen when they passed the (medical marijuana ballot measure),’ he said in February. ‘This has nothing to do with medicinal marijuana. This has to do with getting high.’”)
In Wriggelsworth’s constituency, please recall, the medical pot issue passed 137,122 to 90,952. More people in the county actually voted in favor of medical pot than even bothered to cast a ballot in the contest that gave Wriggelsworth another term. So, whose mandate is larger in the county, medical pot’s or the sheriff’s?
This is actually another manifestation of the urban-rural divide that cleaves Ingham County. If you look at the precinct by precinct results for medical pot, a pattern emerges. Medical pot carried every precinct, but the margins in urban precincts were consistently higher than in rural ones.
And the fact that Ingham County can generate 227,000 votes on a state proposal and only 134,000 for a sheriff’s race indicates to me that some parts of the county don’t consider the sheriff to be a vital public office.
The ultimate solution to this divide is, of course, actual division. Urbanized Ingham should be the heart of an independent Greater Lansing metro government. Rural Ingham County could then go its own way, with both entities setting their own spending policies — and relying on their own tax bases.
