Monday night, Paris voters sat as a captive audience to lawyerly pitch and prattle surrounding the issue of Town Farm Road (yet again) and who should be taking care of this road into Town Farm Estates.
Bubbles of thought could be imagined across the audience: "We need a proper road into our homes." ..."The town needs to be doing something about this."..."Why can't they get this right?"... "This is just the same old same old."... "Why are they so mean to us?"
And there might be other thought bubbles: "What's behind this latest revisit to the situation?"... "Who's behind this?"... "Is this really just about the road and its physical maintenance?"..."Why the focus on who said what, when, and the times in the past when decisions did not reflect the action desired by the lawyer currently speaking?"
..."Why isn't there interest, on the part of the 3-2 voting majority selectmen, in Selectman Herrick's suggestion that an engineer be brought in to assess the road to see if the town might be able to help?" ... " Not an engineer? Just someone to say who's responsible for the road?"
Mr. Hanley spent a good deal of his 33.5 minutes of meeting time Monday trying to assure his audience that the Town Farm Road Association had not wanted to litigate in 2005, they had only wanted to "have these questions answered." They don't want to sue the town now, either, he said; they just want to sit down and talk - to come to some kind of "reasonable outcome."
Mr. Hanley vented his personal frustration that he had received only a "two-sentence" response to these questions from the Paris town manager in April 2005. His presentation Monday, including the interrogation of Selectman Glover, seemed directed toward proving that the former town manager had personally prevented him from facilitating the response he had sought for his clients at that time.
There seemed an intent to show that the town manager had handled the situation badly, i.e., not spoken with selectmen, not corresponded properly through channels; had given an irresponsible response; case in point, contending that the two-sentence letter, mentioned in the previous paragraph, had been an independent action on her part.
Referring to the two-sentence letter, Mr. Hanley said "On April 10th [2005] I received a letter from the town manager, Sharon Jackson...." Except, the letter to him, and cc'd to the selectmen, shows a different date, April 12, 2005, i.e., the day after a regular selectmen's meeting that included an executive session to meet with the town's attorney. Could the use of the wrong date on the letter, plus the omission of the selectmen being notified, have been, perhaps, just a slip of Mr. Hanley's tongue?
Mr. Hanley also complained he was not allowed to speak to the town's attorney himself in April 2005 about the questions he wanted resolved. Could there have been more details to that situation? Details that perhaps might not fit the current need?
What might be the intent here? Could it be to show that the town and its lawyers (a) got the original plan to discontinue the road as a town road in 1933, wrong? (b) in reaffirming the discontinuance in newer legal language in 1967, still got it wrong? (c) in working on it in 2005, got it wrong, again?
Or, could it be that Mr. Hanley's "reasonable outcome" might not mean fixing the road, but rather, getting what we want on our own terms?
