Monday 4-26-10 Paris Selectboard will meet at 7 PM. Please call the town office for the location of the meeting. The agenda is posted here.
The item of "Selectmen's comments," is now a consistent feature listed at the end of each agenda, and evidently covers most anything - somewhere in the vicinity between controversial, random, and currently relevant.
Curiously missing, unless it may have fallen into that last item, is any item listed relevant to Town Atty. Hole's attendance at a special selectboard meeting Tuesday 4-20-10, that 2 1/2 hour, $625 visit, $250 of which turned out to be not the executive session to discuss with the board the Jackson 80B Complaint..
[editor's note: see the previous posting, for 4-22-10, The real question waiting to be answered.]
Just before the start of the executive session Tuesday, Ch. Glover said to the tiny public audience in attendance that any results would be made known to a larger audience in attendance at Monday's regular board meeting; that any decision would be made in public at that time.
If there is no mention of the law suit Monday night (which, as was noted in the press a few weeks ago, had an extension until April 20 to settle out of court, thus the meeting with Atty. Hole), would we assume there is nothing to report? That nothing was discussed or accomplished and nothing is happening, and nothing is going to happen and...if everyone will just stop asking, the whole business will evaporate and it will be as if 600 people were never deeply outraged on June 22 and why don't we just forget this whole last 10 months and pretend this is about somebody else?
We the people get the attorney-client privilege standard, and we also get the strategy that the selectboard could choose, for a period of time, not to disclose certain things in a legally sensitive situation. We have become quite educated in what we cannot be told.
But what our elected officials do not seem to get is that we - many more of us than they are hoping - do not forget. There is not a rug massive enough to sweep this under. Tell us something. This is our town, too. How this is resolved will affect all of us, money aside.
And rest assured that, just as at the federal and state level, our local politicians will need to disclose their voting record and reasons for doing so at some point. Or their lack of doing so, if, in this case, no decision is made and things just fall through everybody's fingers. Government by default.
