What an interesting town council meeting we had the other night. Could make a Hollywood movie out of this last meeting.
First we had our consent agenda: On it was a public hearing pertaining to an EIS study and Exit 4A. Seems we need to have some additional funding to make sure we are ready for the new exit.
Mr Carney raised an objection and wanted this postponed because of the uncertainty about the Rte 93 expansion that has been in the news recently. As many are aware, The state says it has limited money and may decide to widen from Salem to Windham for now. ( This would be a huge mistake as most of the motorists using 93 are from Manch, Derry Londonderry)
Mr Carney in my opinion is wrong about this because it will cost more money if postponed. The money is for the study to be ready for 4A when it comes- Postponing will cost taxpayers more money in the long run.
Next up is the public hearing for the never ending saga of conservation land. The last few weeks has been interesting to say the least about the WEST DERRY vs EAST DERRY treatment of land conservation ( This story has had a life of its own and continues with public hearings coming up)
An emergency preamble got shot down about parking ban along side Mt Pleasant street. It seems most of the highway safety committee believe it will be an issue with buses when school starts. Carney, Coyle,Fairbanks voted down the emergency and because it needed 2/3rd vote it failed. Lets see how the buses fair if any issues come up. And if they do- you may go to the town's web page and look up those councilors numbers and let them know how you feel.
The municipal center will now have an ATM in it so that you can have options when paying your bills.
And then the what everyone waits for all night: Public forum. The same cast that comes most meetings were there and then The Police Union head Mike Houle approached and spoke to the full council about the Morale issues. Twenty officers in street clothing came to support Houle and show a united front. Stay tuned for the next episode:
Of yes, almost forgot. We know know the real reason that there is a push for Manning street to go in and its for the pleasure of one business. She said it herself. Even when studies are against it, even when spending 80K for a wasted project is spoken about. This small groups wants it for that one business. This issue will be discussed next month.
What are your thoughts?
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19 comments:
Brian,
What are you going to do about the issues within the police department? Are you going to address this issue or run and bury your head in the sand again?
Jb,
What would you propose a single councilor to do? I think councilor Carney said it well. Let the town administrator do his job. Would you not agree?
"Issues within the poice department"?
"Morale issues"?
This is what has been accused:
1. Apparently the Chief didn't make a visit to the hospital.
2. Apparently the Chief didn't attend some retirement parties.
3. Jonh Moody like to be called "Doctor"
Did I miss any?
Be serious...these are not indicators of morale issues - they are accusations.
Someone please put me out of my misery of this nonsense and answer me this question - where are the indicators of morale problems?
JB,
What exactly are the issues in the police dept? All we've heard is vague statements about a "morale problem" and the insinuation that 3 officers retired "before they were ready".
People complain about their jobs all the time and in case you haven't been reading the papers, public servants are retiring left and right before changes to the state's retirement system take effect.
If their morale is low because they want to spend more overtime hours on details and then accumulate those hours to milk the cash cow the state is now trying to take away from them, I say tough and welcome to the real world.
These are union guys, right? Don't they have a grievance procedure?
I was the chief union official for a 300 member union manufacturing plant for 10 years. Know how many times I met with the owner of that company (the equivalent of Mr. Stenhouse)? Not once! It doesn't work that way in the union world.
People would constantly complain about their job, the company or whatever. It would also escalate exponentially every 3 years at contract time.
If there was there was a legitimate complaint, we would file a grievance which gave us 4 opportunities to resolve the issue with the company and ultimately if it wasn't resolved we could take it to arbitration.
If Mr. Houle had a list of grievances that had been filed before claiming he had "nowhere else to turn" he might have a little more credibility.
How much more of the taxpayer’s time and money are we going to waste on this issue?
As was stated in Dr. Moody's report, if the police have legitimate issues (and I'm not necessarily saying they don't) there are legitimate avenues to pursue them through.
Once those avenues have been exhausted, and maybe after they resolve their current contract dispute, then let's see where things are at.
But right now, we pay Mr. Stenhouse a lot of money and he has 9 years experience dealing with union issues. I think he might be able to work it out on his own without the assistance of the councilors who are trying to make an issue of this, not one of which has been in THEIR position for 2 years yet.
If they thought they could do a better job than Mr. Stenhouse, they should have applied for the job while it was open.
BC,
Your summary of the evening "forgets" to mention the Well Amendment...please recap that discussion/vote/reasoning.
anonymous 4:35,
How did i forget that? Thanks for reminding me on the well ordinence
BC,
Why does it seems like the Police Chief is flying under the radar? We hear about all the other Department Heads doing this or that on a regular basis but him. One would think that if he had nothing to hide that he might want a study of his Department done to put all of this to bed. If indeed he did not visit one of his Officer's in the hospital when he was injured in the line of duty, I would think there is a problem. I would take a look at the turnover in the Police Department. I don't suggest that we let the inmates run the asylum but there must be something to all of this or why would the Patrolman's Union raise all of this fuss but still want to keep the Chief in office? Hummm??
I just saw Counselor Carney and his wife appear before the ZBA on cable replay. Carney has done a much better job as counselor than I expected. He has distanced himself from the Fairbanks fringe element.
I also have no problem with his ZBA request to have day care at his home. I DO object to the ZBA's rubber stamp of the application. They breezed through the process, with the board asking if the Carneys could accept the conditions. Usually the board gives the conditions and does not care if the applicants appreciate them. This is an obvious case of a Counselor getting preferential treatment.
Hats off to Councilor Ferrante for being the only one in the Real Estate business NOT to participate in the Well Ordinence fiasco.
What a freakin' waste of time for Tom Carrier!
For those uniformed - over two previous meetings the ordinence was watered down by 3 people in the Real Estate business, then they voted against it! Real Estate Broker Brian Chirichiello, Employee of Large Real Estate Developer Janet Fairbanks, and Real Estate Developer Kevin Coyle (you don't think he bought that house on a police prosecutors salary, do you?).
Red flags should go up wildly when BC sees an issue through the same lense as Coyle and Fairbanks.
It's a shame that this is one that you won't see Burtis write about since two of his are involved in the scam. His bloody pen is worthy of this one.
anonymous 5:03,
While I respect your post I will share with you why i did not like this well ordinence. I do not think that goverment should mandate what tests should be done for water testing. The average water well test today is $80. This ordinence would cost the avegage new homeowner over $125 whether they liked it or not. I also did not like the fact that the town would dictate how much water would be produced and not left for the homeowner to make the decision. I voted against this from the begining. Two other counilors who previously voted for it changed their minds at the end at voted against. Fairbanks and Metts. I do notice you left Mr Metts out. I am getting tired of people bashing real estate agents. It's getting old.
OK - I just now watched the replay of the council meeting on derryctv.com. Maybe some people aren't aware that you don't have to wait for the replay on television; the website allows for on-demand streaming.
Anyway BC, you are correct on this aspect, Councilor Metts voted against the Well Ordinance, but he was also the only one who voted against it who explained why he voted against it even though the chair prompted all negative voters to do so.
My take on Councilor Metts' explanation was that he felt it was so watered down (no pun intended) that it no longer addressed the issues that Mr. Carrier initially presented.
This is very different from the concerns of the other negative voters, who all come at it from a similar professional background.
You wrote "I do not think that goverment should mandate what tests should be done for water testing."
Allow me to ask this – isn’t the town exposed to revenue loss when a property has insufficient quality water to sustain a dwelling?
Yes, I know that the free market should see to it that does not happen, but the town is still exposed to the risk, isn't it?.
Are you OK with properties being sold (to the benefit of the Real Estate Industry) with this exposure to the town?
I'm not sure what to make of the "moral" issues in the PD, seems like more of a bargaining ploy then any real "moral" issues.
One item I am very sure about is the detail issues. I am 100% against forcing companies to use police rather than a flagging detail. It's expensive and unwarranted. A company can hire two flagmen for what it would cost for a single police officer. In my experience a set of flagmen do a much better job than a police officer sitting in his car, or talking to another officer who has stopped to chat.
Let Mass. keep this form of socialism.
One strange thing about the open space controversy that Ms Fairbanks and Rose keep bringing up is that in all the news articles that have quoted them, not one has asked them what evidence they have that the CC members are manipulating open space purchased so that they can benefit financially from them.
A quick vocabulary lesson for all of us here; especially a few Town Councilors:
SLANDER:
A type of defamation. Slander is an untruthful oral (spoken) statement about a person that harms the person's reputation or standing in the community. Because slander is a tort (a civil wrong), the injured person can bring a lawsuit against the person who made the false statement. If the statement is made via broadcast media -- for example, over the radio or on TV -- it is considered libel, rather than slander, because the statement has the potential to reach a very wide audience.
where there's smoke there's fire. i bet were our overpaid, over responsive fire department to bring along one of their heat detection gadgets and scan the police station they would see chief garone glow like the sun. unless of course he was at the boy's and girls club, as usual, hangin' out with the other entrenched townies and good old artie.
we've been hearin' about patrolman dissatisfaction for too long for there not to be something to the rumblings...garone nor any public official thought to check in on an injured patrolman? kind of speaks volumes about our chief of police and community leaders, don't ya think?
The days of making policy in this town based on insinuation, innuendo, and outright slander are fast coming to a close. People have had it with that crap and the complete lack of progress that goes with it.
Certain members of the council have been talking about this "issue" for 6 months now. And yet there has still not been one piece of concrete proof to substantiate the accusations of Mr. Houle, the head of a union that has, coincidentally, been trying unsuccesfully to negotiate a new contract over that same 6 months.
Beyond that, our town administrator has said he is satisfied with the results of Dr. Moody's investigation of the matter.
Our town charter does not allow the council to supersede the authority clearly given to our administrator in matters such as this.
That makes it a non-issue. Time to move on and stop wasting taxpayer’s time and money trying to make it into something it's not.
I'm sure the councilors behind this will have no trouble finding someone else to throw stones at.
My bet is that it will be one of the following: town administrator, fire dept., conservation board, or that ever popular target, the council chairman.
Let's all watch the papers and this blog together to find out if I'm right.
Let's review some Town of Derry history. Employess of a former Department Head complained for years that there were problems within the department but nothing was ever done to look into the employess complaints. When the Town FINALLY decided to look into the dealings of this Department Head, lo and behold he was stealing the town blind. Who was that Department Head? Does anyone remember Alan Swan? He had also worked for the Town for 20 something years. Now I have no knowledge of what's going on with in the Police Department, but I believe as a citizen, we would be foolish not to at least look into the Patrolman's complaints and this time maybe speak to some of the employees who are reporting problems. If we had not done that with Alan Swan, he would probably still be a Department Head and still be building additions at his house using more Town money. DO SOMETHING!
anonymous 5:33,
You raise a valid point in pointing to the Alan Swan fiasco, however herein lies the rub: not one "employee" from the police outside of Mr. Houle has chosen to go on the record in support of Mr. Houle's position.
We have yet to see one grievance that has been filed on behalf of the union. Mr. Houle appeared at a council meeting with what was reported in the paper as 20 other officers, yet none of them spoke. Why?
Getting less than half of your union membership behind you to spend a half hour at a council meeting in the middle of contract negotiations is not all that difficult. If they do not have the fortitude or facts to speak to a given issue then their issue must not be very relevant.
This issue initially made the papers months ago with the retirement of 3 officers that left "before they were ready" according to Mr. Houle. These officers are obviously no longer with the department. If they were "not ready" as has been suggested, why have they not gone to the press or better yet why has the press not been able to contact them to get the real story?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if there's something legitimate here, let's see it, hear it, whatever. Or better yet, if this issue is so important to the union, let them resolve it, as the Derry News has suggested, as part of the current contract negotiations.
I wonder if they would rather get their construction detail ordinance that they previously declared an impasse over, or resolve their "morale issues".
Hey, there's a good question the papers might actually want to ask Mr. Houle or the members of his union, just in the interest of objective journalism. Maybe we’ll get to see the answer in the Eagle Trib/Derry News or Union Leader next week?
Great blog where there is smoke ,there's fire. You hit all the nails on the head.
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