Start here · the whole story
Four of Lapeer’s five city commissioners are the same people they were two years ago. Almost everything about how they govern is different. Here is the whole story, in order, and short. Every part of it comes from the city’s own meeting minutes, and each chapter links to the full evidence.
In order
2023 to 2025
For two years, this commission mostly agreed. Across 55 meetings the board split just 48 times, and more than half of its meetings ended with no divided vote at all. There was no faction. When the board did split, it was usually one commissioner voting no alone, most often Petrie.
How Lapeer voted before →November 2025
Jeramy Hing was elected mayor. Lynne McCarthy won the seat Commissioner Swindell had held. The other four commissioners, Atwood, Brady, Glisman, and Petrie, all stayed exactly where they were.
November 17, 2025 · 6:36 p.m.
Minutes after taking the oath, the new board divided 3-2 four times, before it reached a single item of city business. A brand-new commissioner, casting her first votes ever on the board, sided with the same two colleagues on every one. The conflict did not build up. It arrived fully formed, on the first night.
Decided before the gavel? →Since then
The board has split 83 times in the months since. And the same three names are on the winning side almost every time: Glisman, McCarthy, and Petrie on top, Atwood and Brady outvoted. The two years of near-agreement were over the moment the new mayor sat down.
How Lapeer votes now →At every meeting
When the chair rules a commissioner “out of order,” it is a public reprimand. That has happened 16 times, and 15 of them landed on Atwood and Brady, the same two who lose every vote. In two years before, it happened to no one.
Out of order →On the contested items
A motion used to be one sentence, worked out in the discussion. Now the important ones arrive as long, finished legal documents, complete with findings and charter citations, written before the meeting begins. Read them and it is hard to believe they were drafted in the room.
Read the motions →Spring 2026
The mayor wrote his own version of the city manager’s evaluation form, pushed it through 3-2, and then was the only person who used it to fail him. We read all 14 released documents and checked them against the contract he kept citing.
The review that failed →The question
Michigan law says a commission is supposed to do its deliberating in public, out loud. Instead the record keeps showing decisions that arrive already made: motions written in advance, votes that never change, findings with no discussion behind them. If the deciding did not happen at the meeting, where did it happen?
None of this comes from us. It comes from the city’s own minutes, meeting by meeting. We just put it in order. The full timeline, with every date and vote, is one click away.
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