I must confess to a feeling of near bi-partisan enthusiasm when I glanced at the headline to Kathy Sullivan’s Tuesday morning UL Column—“Why Municipal executives records must be kept public.” Without having yet read it thoughts of typing up one of the rarest of blog posts, one in which I can say without reservation that there was something Dame Sullivan and I could both agree on, danced like aisle-crossing sugar plums in my head. I actually thought, “Wow, what are the odds?” Then I found time to read it.
Her treatise is simple. Allowing the legislature to further water down the necessary transparency afforded by 91-A will allow Republicans (in this case Mayor Gatsas) to continue gaming the system to get away with their dirty manipulative tricks. She frames this argument by pointing out any number of meetings the Mayor had on specific dates with Manchester Alderman, and various committee members, in groups and at times that eliminated the requirement to announce the meetings to the public or reveal the content of discussions held in them. She is quite thorough in her recollections, for which I applaud her, except for one.
Manchester has one Republican Alderman. So almost every Alderman who participated in these suspicious meetings was a Democrat. So Dem Sullivan, in her enthusiastic quest to create suspicion about the meeting behavior of one (maybe two) Republicans, has forced us to suspect a baker’s dozen of elected Manchester democrats in the same "potential" impropriety. I say potential because Kathy is cautious enough to couch her suspicion in the obvious–being purposefully non-public gatherings of elected officials we have no way of knowing what was discussed–but her intentions is clear. To smear Gatsas and demonstrate the habitual nature of his "potential" to abuse his power. But if that is the case, then Democrat Alderman who attended these meetings are equally suspect of the same habitual abuse of power. That’s a lot of democrats abusing power Kathy. WTF?
So this is cause to celebrate. Manchester has elected a super-duper-pooper-scooper-majority of democrat Alderman who repeatedly hold non-public meetings with the mayor to hide what Kathy suspects could be the people’s business. And while we’re toasting Kathy’s intentional double standard we should take time to remind everyone that the democrat majority legislature in Concord is responsible for passing the legislation that would allow this kind ot tom-foolery by law, and which can only become law if our little democrat governor signs it.
So does Sullivan really want to protect 91-A? It’s hard to say. This, like most everything else she has to comment on, started out with a ray of hope but turned into just another excuse to spin an important issue into backhanded partisan politics. And while I can thank her for suggesting that something is not right in Manchester, she could better serve the interests of the people by holding everyone equally accountable instead of hiding her own parties complicity–not that anyone should be surprised by this.
Cross Posted From NH Insider
