So it looks like removing the Indian as the logo for Turners Falls High School wasn’t exactly the political “change agent’ everyone expected.
Up until Monday’s election, all we kept hearing was how the “silent majority,” infuriated by the Gill-Montague School Committee’s decision to remove the Indian, would rise up on Election Day and squash the incumbents who not only allowed, but encouraged, said change.
Well, so much for that theory.
Not only did incumbents Mike Langknecht and Timmie Smith win re-election, but newcomers Jennifer Lively and Haley Anderson also won seats, despite public favoring of the mascot change. It was a result which certainly shocked some people, myself included, but maybe shouldn’t have in hindsight.
Putting aside for the moment the fairly anemic 24 percent voter turnout, one reason may be the choice of the new logo — the Thunder — which was announced the week before the election. The decision, made by a popular vote of three final choices, was not a bad one from where I sit, as was the Red Hawk when Frontier Regional School said goodbye to the Redskin back in the early 2000s.
Another factor may have been the entire Gill Selectboard’s decision to send out a letter endorsing what wound up being the winning slate of candidates.
It’s unusual to see an entire board endorse any one candidate, let alone four, and the move generated quite a bit of protest from pro-Indian faction members, who argued that the endorsement was a conflict of interest.
To my knowledge, no formal charge has been lodged with the State Ethics Commission regarding the letter, which was sent privately and not on official town stationary.
Another reason may have been a feeling, deserved or not, that the pro-Indian slate would have been a one-issue voting block, even though Chris Pinardi, Joyce Phillips, Heather Poirier and Robert Whittier did their best to convince voters that it was about more than just the logo issue.
I also think Gill and Montague’s changing demographics were a big factor. These towns seem to grow more liberal by the year, and the growing progressive desire to be more politically active on the local level during in the Trump era may have helped get out the vote.
There is also the possibility — which pro-Indian folks will no doubt dispute — that the voters like the job Smith and Langknecht have been doing, and felt Anderson and Lively were better choices to continue that work. It also may have been a vote of support for current Superintendent Mike Sullivan, who might have had a tough time keeping his job had the vote gone the other way.
The candidates who ended up on the losing side probably shouldn’t feel too badly about finishing out of the running, because they are the ones getting off easy. There are still a boatload of issues facing this district, including ongoing financial struggles, a burgeoning school choice deficit, and a growing bullying problem at Turners Falls High School, which was a topic which came up a lot during the campaign.
The one debate topic which I hope won’t be on the table will be the logo, on which the people have now spoken — although I expect some sputtering to continue in the Bourdeau Field bleachers for many years to come.
I think people assumed the removal of Isaac Mass and Brickett Allis from the leadership would result in détente in the budget war of words between the Greenfield City Council and Mayor Bill Martin.
That does not appear to be the case, as evidenced by Martin’s reaction to a series of proposed budget cuts released by Mass and Allis shortly before this week’s annual budget meeting.
Martin’s response might have set a record for the number of different ways a mayor could characterize a pair of councilors as being “uninformed,” and it was pretty clear that His Honor viewed the cuts as more of a personal slight than just a pair of elected officials exercising the checks and balances afforded them as members of Greenfield’s legislative arm of government.
“The cuts proposed by Councilors Mass and Allis are an overly simplistic reaction to a complex budget problem,” Martin wrote in his cover letter, adding later that he viewed some of the suggestions made regarding certain government positions to be “insulting” to the people who work in Town Hall.
“The mayor must protect and defend municipal employees,” Martin added. “My tone may be harsh, but I feel that this micromanagement through the budget process is unwarranted.”
I’d suggest he might want to get used to it, even if he’s probably only going to have to deal with it for one more year.