It's easy to laugh at the name calling, screaming, and temper tantrums at the Marshfield Select Board until you realize they have an elected official who sticks to his guns. We don't.
My point of view is that government should be run by elected officials and that we should have contested elections.
Look, it's my Substack. Sometimes I do news reporting, sometimes analysis, whichever is going to create the most value, in my opinion, at the time. In this case, I've watched dozens of Duxbury's Selectboard meetings, and they are just awful, almost unbearable to watch. The town manager bullies the Selectboard members over and over again, often coming in with some proposal or rule change he just finished 10 minutes earlier and they haven't had time to read. They will sometimes put up a fight, kind of like the residents in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catcher. But their words of resistance almost never go anywhere. They fold and do what the town manager wants, no matter how poorly thought through.
This practice has gotten us into a lot of trouble, so much so that we have to pay for the DPW building and are also facing a $5.8 million operating override and a $38 million request for an override to pay for PFAS remediation, a proposal that will be presented tomorrow.
You are free to your own opinion, but at this particular case and with this particular story, the urgent lesson for Duxbury is that being too polite has gotten us into this situation, and the only way out is to stand up for ourselves.
What's more there's nothing particularly controversial in saying that we should have contested elections and should be concerned when unelected bureaucrats bulldoze the people we've elected to represent us.
For what it's worth, someone else complained that because I wasn't clear about what side I was on regarding my machine gun licensing story.
What happened to objective news reporting? You’re acting like an advocate of a point of view, not an objective reporter.
My point of view is that government should be run by elected officials and that we should have contested elections.
Look, it's my Substack. Sometimes I do news reporting, sometimes analysis, whichever is going to create the most value, in my opinion, at the time. In this case, I've watched dozens of Duxbury's Selectboard meetings, and they are just awful, almost unbearable to watch. The town manager bullies the Selectboard members over and over again, often coming in with some proposal or rule change he just finished 10 minutes earlier and they haven't had time to read. They will sometimes put up a fight, kind of like the residents in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catcher. But their words of resistance almost never go anywhere. They fold and do what the town manager wants, no matter how poorly thought through.
This practice has gotten us into a lot of trouble, so much so that we have to pay for the DPW building and are also facing a $5.8 million operating override and a $38 million request for an override to pay for PFAS remediation, a proposal that will be presented tomorrow.
You are free to your own opinion, but at this particular case and with this particular story, the urgent lesson for Duxbury is that being too polite has gotten us into this situation, and the only way out is to stand up for ourselves.
What's more there's nothing particularly controversial in saying that we should have contested elections and should be concerned when unelected bureaucrats bulldoze the people we've elected to represent us.
For what it's worth, someone else complained that because I wasn't clear about what side I was on regarding my machine gun licensing story.