FW: The town needs your help

[Neil Rossen]

From: Roger Challen [mailto:r...@datadist.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2010 4:41 PM
To: Roger Challen
Subject: FW: The Town needs your help now.


I would like to forward this from John Butler, sent to me yesterday.
Tomorrow is the election..

From: johnbb...@gmail.com [mailto:johnbb...@gmail.com] On
Behalf Of John Butler
Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2010 2:25 PM
Subject: The Town needs your help now.

Friends,
If you are not sure how you are going to vote in the Town election on
Monday, or whether you are going to vote on Monday, I want to suggest
to you that the Town needs a change on the Board of Selectmen.
Unfortunately, this situation now rises above the normal range of
"politics." If you already believe that we need a change, and plan to
vote, then please call one friend and say, “I think this might be
important. Are you voting?”
Lastly, if you are thinking about voting for Sal Giorlandino for
reelection, I’d ask you, respectfully, to read this and reconsider. I
know that is a lot to ask. But, this is not about politics in any
usual sense. Our Town simply needs to set a new course. We should
thank Mr. Giorlandino, but move on.
Most of the Town’s senior managers have been dragged through a
pointless and embittering legal process, that cost them personally
about $15000 in legal fees, for nothing. One of our best employees has
already resigned because of it. Today’s editorial in the Metrowest
News captures only part of the problem, as I have detailed below.
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinions/editorials/x1773729972/Editorial-Southborough-selectmen-have-some-reputations-to-fix
I’ve served the Town for 25 years on various Town boards, for the last
half-dozen on Advisory Committee. During those decades I’ve seen some
Boards of Selectmen that were very good, and also remember some that
were weak. But, I’ve never seen anything quite like this, so many bad
decisions, such a display of inappropriate temperament for public
office.
For that reason, although I have supported candidates in the past, I
have never done so out of a concern for specific and repeated bad
decisions. However, at this juncture the only way to serve the Town is
to say plainly, in public, the critical things that must be said.
If I were alone in having such a strong view, it would be time for me
to retire from volunteering my service to the Town. But this
situation has brought together people who very often disagree
strongly, if respectfully, about Town policy. If you have been at
Town Meeting the last few years you have seen Roger Challen and me
disagreeing vehemently about Town fiscal policy, arguing year after
year after year. When Al Hamilton and I started working together we
came from absolutely opposing viewpoints on school matters. Sad to say
now, we all agree on this. It is now up to us, as voters to attempt to
fix it.

When I say this is not about Town politics, I mean that I don’t have
any predisposition to prefer John Rooney over Sal Giorlandino. If
there hadn’t been this demonstration of incompetence by the current
Board, I’d naturally support the incumbent, and thank Rooney for
volunteering. But now, we, as a Town, are just lucky that John Rooney
volunteered to run. He seems to me to be quite capable.
Perhaps there is some chance you haven’t been watching what has been
going on and are wondering about the larger picture that has led me to
arrive at such a strong view. I will try to summarize for you below.
The only justification for the strength of the conclusion is that the
latest news is just one of many elements of the picture. This has
been going on long enough with enough separate events to conclude that
it isn’t a one time aberration.
Please vote on Monday. Thank you.
John Butler

Here is what has happened:
 Last year the Board of Selectmen chose the new police chief with a
biased selection process that made the acting Chief an automatic
finalist. This was ill advised, but might have been acceptable had she
been able to immediately gain peer and Town support. Unfortunately,
she meet with skepticism, partly as a result of the biased process.
She needed a fair selection process, win or lose, which the BOS didn’t
provide. Lacking that, she began to suffer under public innuendo. For
example, bitter complaints about the Chief selection bias arose on the
mysouthborough.com site.
 In the most bizarre of the Selectmen decisions, last Fall, the
Board tried to find out the name of an anonymous poster named “Marty”
who was harping on the biased Chief selection process. They did this
by sending a Constable carrying threatening letters to the
mysouthborough blog owner, Susan Fitzgerald. The letters trample over
all ideas of free speech. It was Southborough’s own “Nixon’s
plumbers”, and just about as effective. Since they didn’t have a legal
leg to stand on, this attempt failed and was a waste of money.
However, the public backlash against the Board caused a huge spotlight
to be focused on the “Marty accusations”. This was exactly
counterproductive, since it brought the focus back to Chief Moran’s
biased appointment process. See http://www.mysouthborough.com/2010/03/19/a-post-i-never-expected-to-write/
for the sordid details. If you wanted to make the public situation
worse for Chief Moran, the Board of Selectmen chose the exact right
path.
 It is impossible, at least in this country, to quell public talk by
these methods. Apparently unchastened, Mr. Giorlandino was still
talking in the press about “financial consequences” to “Marty” as late
as March of this year. I do wonder what country he thinks he lives
in. It is nearly impossible for public officials to sustain libel,
and government has not been able to claim defamation since the
expiration of the Sedition Act in 1800. All he accomplished with such
bluster was to create media attention, which was fundamentally unfair
to Chief Moran, refocusing on the biased selection process.
 In the bad climate of the Fall, there arose a claim that Chief
Moran’s peers, the Town’s top professional managers, all non-Union,
were speaking ill of her, over pizza in Westborough. Of course what
was needed by the Board of Selectmen in response was a concerned but
light touch, with lots of private meetings, to sooth frayed nerves.
It is true they should have consulted with counsel, but they should
have handled it internally and comparatively quietly until all were
satisfied. Nothing about these trivial claims justified what ensued.
The Board of Selectmen decided on a heavy handed disciplinary process
with eight of the senior Town department managers, four or more
becoming defendants in a legal process, hiring their own lawyers,
spending $15000 of their personal money to defend themselves. How
could this foster long term peer respect? What would be the effect of
this on the Town's management team?
 One result of this heavy handed approach was that Vera Kolias, Town
Planner and one of our best employees, promptly started looking for
another job, found one, and resigned. She said she would not have
looked at all, but for this situation. Others may follow. There is
great bitterness now. I worry for our ability to hire with this
scorched landscape that now prevails.
 Think how you would feel about a peer at work if you had to hire a
lawyer to defend your job for something that, maybe, someone said over
pizza about her in another town. The heavy process can only amplify
peer resentment and make you hate the powers that caused this. Those
powers would be the Board of Selectmen.
 When this mess resolved last week, after more than six months of
bitterness, there was a determination of no wrongdoing. All of this
was over nothing. This gave us the sad spectacle of no less than the
Town Manager, Jean Kitchen, asking the Board of Selectmen for an
apology. What a terrible climate we have created.
 Now we have a report from the outside counsel who conducted the
investigation. Of course at the start it lauds the wisdom of those
paying the author's fees for this crazy process, but at least it has
the honesty to say in its concluding recommendations that "A protocol
should be developed so that employees who believe a problem exists..
can address the concerns in a prompt way, and on a local level." It
goes on to specifically site the kind of concerns that were the
subject of this process as being ones that should be handled
differently.
 Now the decision to choose this overblown process has backfired yet
again and in a new way. I am afraid the report holds up to public
glare a long list of complaints from the Police Chief, that, may well
be read by many as being unflatteringly petty for someone in a
position as senior as that which she now holds. All this could have
been avoided.
 If fear of a lawsuit by the Police Chief drove these bad decisions,
such fear doesn’t excuse those judgments. Perversely these judgments
created exactly a public climate in which Chief Moran may feel most
publicly abused, and now, added to that, her peers feel persecuted as
well.
 Mr. Giorlandino claimed in a recent email to mysouthborough.com
that the disciplinary action against the eight employees was required
by the Town’s Professional Conduct policy. A copy of the policy makes
it clear that there is no such requirement. At the very least,
Giorlandino’s statement reflects a continued lack of understanding of
what it means to operate in public. Of course the cited policy would
be obtained and published. These things can’t be hidden. When it
contained no such statement, it was another black eye.
 In the same vein, the Board of Selectmen, when announcing the end
of the investigation, made a statement implying that there was no
connection between Vera Kolias’s departure and the heavy handed
investigation. Unfortunately for their reputation for veracity, she
was at the same time stating in a public Planning Board meeting that
it was the investigation that drove her to seek a different job, and
she would be here still were it not for the investigation. Presumably
it would have been wise to ask her before making such a statement
 I conclude from all of this that we do not have a situation of ‘one
mistake” from which it would be best to forgive and move on, but
rather a pattern of misjudging the effects of one’s decisions and
repeatedly making and defending the wrong choices.