As a general rule, I don’t respond to another person’s opinion piece in this newspaper. After all, it is their opinion. However, I make an exception for the piece written by Susan Worgaftik, “Trust, respect, and Greenfield government” published on Sept. 6, because it is an ill-informed opinion that intends to mislead the public with insinuations.
Worgaftik seeks to connect three undertakings occurring in the city involving me acting in my capacity as mayor and turn them into some sort of linked conspiracy to ignore my responsibilities to the people of Greenfield while carrying out my daily work as mayor. They are the reinstatement of Police Chief Robert Haigh Jr. to his role as police chief of the Greenfield Police Department, the Police Department audit that I have asked for along with a related citizen’s task force put forth by City Councilor Marianne Bullock, and the environmental cleanup of 298 Federal St., the former Lunt property. That’s some mental acrobatics right there.
Worgaftik begins with the reinstatement of Police Chief Haigh. She implies that I somehow circumvented the purpose of a special meeting of the City Council, a meeting that I called for as is a mayor’s right under the Greenfield charter. Out of courtesy and respect for the role of city councilors in our government, the special executive session covered three reasons: to inform the council in executive session of the results of an independent investigation into an out-of-court meeting that occurred between Chief Haigh and Police Lt. Todd Dodge during the recent discrimination civil trial involving former officer Patrick Buchanan and Dodge, to give the councilors access to the investigator who attended the meeting so that they could ask questions of him, and to share with them that I would be reinstating Robert Haigh as the city’s police chief. They certainly had a right to be informed of all of this in a timely manner before release of a public statement on the chief’s status. However, they don’t control when the public statement gets released. Neither the investigation nor the reinstatement of Chief Haigh were related to the finding against the city in the Buchanan case.
She then goes on to cite a litany of events that occurred in the past in the Greenfield Police Department, as if stating them proved some point. The list came not from her personal knowledge of each event and how it was handled within the department by Chief Haigh, but rather from the civil trial plaintiff’s complaint requesting a jury trial. Many of the events were personnel related and subject to employment contracts and appropriate disciplinary actions. There are pages and pages of regulations, policies, and procedures about how a commanding officer must process complaints and employment infractions.
Chief Haigh took over the Police Department at one of its lowest points. He and his fellow officers have made great improvements over the last few years in how the department is run and how it interacts with the people it serves. Is there room for more improvement? Absolutely. Is Chief Haigh ready to continue working toward those improvements? Yes. That is why I have called for an independent audit of the Police Department that has the full support of both Chief Haigh and Deputy Chief Gordon. With racial bias, discrimination, and gender equity as the primary rationale, the audit will cover organizational structure and governance, operating policies and procedures, department culture, hiring and promotional practices, professional standards and accountability, budgeting and planning. As of this writing, although submitted at the end of July, the City Council, which is charged with approving my funding request for the audit, has yet to take a vote on it. So, no, I’m not the one “dismissing” the audit, as charged by Worgaftik. Why would I dismiss a study that I called for?
For the finale, she makes a dubious segue to the environmental cleanup of 298 Federal St., the former Lunt property, and the citizen involvement in that cleanup under the Public Involvement Process (PIP). At no time did I ever promise to anyone to submit a request to the City Council for $20,000 for a second Licensed Site Professional (LSP) to review the plans of the current LSP working on behalf of the city and the lessee operator of 298 Federal St. I said I would give it some consideration but that it was unlikely I would order that expenditure. The cleanup of the Federal Street property has been going on since 2012 and the LSP who is overseeing the property and who has a 35-year career in that profession has been working on behalf of the city and its lessee for several years. The regional Department of Environmental Protection audit chief, overseeing the audit of the cleanup for the state, does not believe that the city needs either a new replacement LSP or an additional one. The city will abide by whatever findings and orders come from the DEP and, hopefully, come to a conclusion at some point in the near future on how to continue to cleanup 298 Federal St. to its best possible outcome.
Far from ignoring the “good faith” efforts of citizens, I have listened carefully to them. I have proceeded based on what are the best possible outcomes for our city and that are legally within my power to bring about without jeopardizing the city’s lawful position. I do not question the sincerity of the concerns of many residents on the matters mentioned here, but I do question the “due diligence” research of some people that is one-sided and designed to prove a particular biased point rather than seek a common understanding of what is possible. Surely, we’re all working toward the same goal: a cleaner, better, safer Greenfield that allows us to positively move forward. Let’s at least all make a good faith effort to achieve that goal without operating on insinuation, speculation, and inflammatory personal attacks.
Roxann Wedegartner is the mayor of Greenfield.