I wouldn’t expect to see Greenfield School Committee member Susan Hollins attending any fundraisers for school board candidate Amy Proietti in the near future.
Proietti, who is pretty much a lock to win a four-year seat in November, came to the most recent School Committee meeting to call out Hollins for her involvement in the town of Warwick’s efforts to open a Horace Mann Charter School its former elementary school building.
Proietti said she learned of Hollins’s involvement in a recent Recorder My Turn column, and it immediately set off alarm bells for her.
“Minimally, this has the appearance of a conflict of interest, given her role as a member of the Greenfield School Committee,” Proietti said. “It may be an actual conflict, in which case, resolution is required.”
It’s fairly unusual for a candidate for office to go after a member of a committee said candidate is seeking to join, but Proietti’s concerns are somewhat justified. A Warwick charter school could prove to be quite a draw for local parents, including a few from Greenfield. And the good doctor’s involvement in developing such a school could result in Greenfield losing some school choice dollars it can ill afford to.
Proietti called on Hollins to contact the State Ethics Commission for a ruling on whether any conflict exists, and report back at the board’s next meeting. We’ll see if that happens, but in the meantime, the committee has other fish to fry, including passing an amended operating budget to reflect the amounts passed by the City Council this spring.
As you may recall, the school budget sent to the council by Mayor Bill Martin was roughly $1.3 million below the amount requested by the School Committee. The council put roughly half of that money back, requiring the administration and School Committee to develop and pass an adjusted budget, which was to have been voted on this month.
A budget discussion was to have occurred at the same Sept. 16 meeting Proietti attended, but got derailed by what has turned out to be a major Achiiles’ heel for this committee, the state Open Meeting Law.
As the debate was set to begin, Martin questioned whether the committee had received the necessary budget information within 48 hours, as required by law. Chairwoman Adrienne Nunez argued that the Open Meeting Law only requires that the meeting be officially posted within 48 hours, which it was. And though the facts appeared to be on her side, Nunez said the “tone” of the discussion, coupled with the short time allotted for the current meeting, led her to call for the motion to be tabled until further notice.
Meanwhile, the school department continues to operate, even though it’s budget remains in a limbo borne largely of political dysfunction.
It looks like Greenfield’s Safe Cities Ordinance will finally be decided next week.
The Greenfield City Council has called a special meeting for Tuesday night to decide whether to sustain or override Mayor Bill Martin’s veto of the measure. A vote to sustain kills Safe Cities for at least two years. A vote to override enacts it, which sends it to the ballot in November as a binding referendum question.
At present, the Safe Cities vote is the only item on the agenda. What is missing is action on Albert Norman’s request to place a binding question on the ballot asking voters if they favor removal of a series of zoning restrictions on the French King Highway.
That vote might have been taken at the September meeting, but was thwarted when Councilors Isaac Mass, Brickett Allis and Wanda Muzyka-Pyfrom objected which, under the rules of procedure, automatically sends the matter back to committee. That would mean the earliest the council could vote on it is Oct. 16, which is long after the Oct. 1 deadline to put a question on the ballot.
Norman this week accused the council this week of “running out the clock” on him and he may very well be right. But there is still an outside chance he could get his way.
The Safe Cities vote requires the council to suspend its rules of procedure, and once that happens, what’s to stop a councilor from making a motion to reconsider the French King question? I’m not sure the votes are there to pass it, especially considering Norman has filed a civil lawsuit against the city on this same matter, but it could happen.
And if it does, I would expect the resulting public backlash would make what happened during the last council meeting’s public comment session look like an ice cream social by comparison, and rightfully so.
Chris Collins is a Greenfield native who has covered local politics on various media platforms for close to a quarter of a century. He can be reached at sourcechris.collins@gmail.com.