To the good people of Greenfield: We had a tumultuous few weeks locally. It is time to take stock.
Our city police department was found guilty of discrimination against one of its officers. This was the second independent adjudication on this issue. The first was an arbitration that the town lost. The lawsuit followed. Since that time, Mayor Roxann Wedegartner said that she thinks that the police chief will be exonerated.
The City Council, concerned that nothing was going to be done, voted to cut $425,000, a 15% reduction of the mayor’s police budget. That $425,000 was approximately the value of Police Chief Robert Haigh’s salary and that of Lt. Dan McCarthy.
The city’s Human Rights Commission, recognizing that the lawsuit had demonstrated racism and a toxic work environment, publicly calls for Haigh’s removal because they do not believe that he can effectively lead the department under these circumstances.
Instead of even considering firing (or even laying off) both of these officers, the mayor and acting Police William Gordon proposed cutting eight officers and the police dog program. This garners sympathy from many citizens in town and does nothing to respond to the charges of racism and a toxic work environment that were the reasons for the lawsuit.
As many citizens are upset, the mayor announces an independent investigation of the police in regard to the issues in the lawsuit. We do not know the scope of services for this investigation and many of us question if this is will be a whitewash and a way to make discussion of this issue disappear. “We can’t talk about this issue, there is an investigation going on.” Hmmm.
Residents of Country Club Road are rightfully concerned that an open-air marijuana grow will be across the street from 135 homes and that they seem to have little say about it. The entrepreneurs who want this grow found a way to skirt the state regulations designed to protect communities. They have involved former Greenfield mayor Bill Martin in pushing this through and Mayor Wedegartner has OK’d this process. This grow will have 8-foot fences with razor wire and will be patrolled. Basically, the more than five football fields of agricultural land across from these homes will become an outdoor “marijuana prison.”
This is not agriculture. This is exploitation. The smell from the marijuana grow will make it impossible for these residents to enjoy their homes for at least three months out of the year. The property values of these homes will plummet. But that is OK because there is money to be made here — by a select few.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has found that the community’s questions about the Lunt property clean up are valid. There must be further decontamination of that property and it needs to happen soon.
I’ll bet you thought that this was a non-issue. Of course, the city had cleaned up the Lunt site 10 years ago. After all, there was EPA money to do so and since that time, the buildings are now used for substance abuse detox. Everything must have been cleaned up for that to happen. Right?
Not so. The Lunt Neighborhood Action group brought in MassDEP to check that out. The results of the audit confirm that the contamination at the Lunt property was not properly investigated, and the contaminants have not been properly controlled. The city has 60 days to submit a “conceptual Phase II Scope of Work” to DEP for review and approval.
The mayor and 501 Liberty Street, LLC, the Lunt property lessee and potential buyer, have shared the Licensed Site Professional who is supposed to ensure that the site is clean. The buyer and the seller are collaborating in this process. No one is advocating for the public — except the public, that is.
So what do we learn from all this?
It appears that the only way that the concerns of citizens get responded to by the city administration is if an outside organization comes in to make them do what is supposed to be done.
The mayor, who is elected by all of Greenfield, seems to respond to some of us more than others. If you have money, power, or know the right folks, nothing, it seems, can touch you.
There is a fiction in this city that the people we elect represent us. When the City Council tries to do just that, they get vilified and threatened. When the community speaks up, we get marginalized. There is something very, very wrong here and we need to fix it.
Susan Worgaftik lives in Greenfield.