Here's the article he was texting me about: "After failed search for police monitor, Madison oversight board opts for recruiting help" (Wisconsin State Journal).
The search for someone to fill this newly created position was deemed to have failed "after the person recruited and selected by the board, with help from the city’s Human Resources Department, took himself out of the running amid revelations that he’d discriminated against a woman he’d been having an affair with and violated state licensing requirements at a company he ran more than 15 years ago."
We're told the position will pay $125,000. I can't picture it ever being properly filled, yet apparently now we're going to pay people to try to fill it, because God knows, they can't back down.
ADDED: More about Eric A. Hill's lawsuit here.
[H]e began looking at the public social media pages of members of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board [and found]... “29 separate instances of biased, defamatory statements — occasionally containing obscene language — impugning my race, gender and former profession, among the social media accounts of seven out of the 11 voting members in charge of hiring for this position,” he says....
“As a white, male, former military policeman, I found their brazenly racist, sexist and anti-military posts not only personally demeaning, but professionally deleterious to my status as a candidate for this position, as I was additionally required — and not permitted to decline — to self-identify my race and gender to the city of Madison in its initial application form,” Hill said in a statement....