Published in the June 28, 2018 edition
By MARK SARDELLA
It’s a question that lots of people have to be asking themselves in the wake of Tuesday’s election results.
Anyone who attended Annual Town Meeting and sat through a two-and-a-half hour presentation and debate and then voted with the overwhelming majority in favor of the Public Safety Building project could hardly be blamed for wondering why they even bothered.
And those were the people who had the least invested in it.
How must the Permanent Building Committee be feeling? They had more than two years invested in this project. Two years on long meetings sorting through alternately dizzying and mind-numbing amounts of information and possible solutions.
Why did they bother?
All of those meetings over that two-year period — meetings of the Permanent Building Committee, the Board of Selectmen, the Finance Committee, etc. were posted open public meetings. I was at many of them. There was rarely anyone there from the public.
Where was the opposition before the last couple of months?
In the spring of 2016, Annual Town Meeting voted $100,000 to do a needs assessment of the Public Safety Building. The Permanent Building Committee hired a highly-respected architectural firm to conduct a needs assessment of the Public Safety Building. They spent 10 months producing a comprehensive report.
How many people who voted “No” on Tuesday read even one page of the report? The voters who attended Town Meeting did — or they at least listened as Police Chief Rick Smith walked them through the highlights. After they weighed the information and listened to all the counterarguments, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Public Safety Building project.
You could say that the Town Meeting vote was a small sample of the electorate, but it was an informed sample. The vote was 168-41 in favor of the Public Safety Building project. A 4-1, 127-vote margin. That’s about as close to a mandate as you get without packing Town Meeting.
The margin on Tuesday that reversed Town Meeting’s vote was considerably smaller – 76 votes.
Sure, more voters participate in an election. But where were all those people when the Town Meeting vote took place? Where were half of those people, or even a quarter of them when Town Meeting was hearing about and debating this project? Maybe if they had attended and listened to both sides, they would come to the same conclusion as those who did attend.
I would love to go through the 204 certified signatures on the petition for the Special Election and see how many of those who signed also attended Town Meeting. But why bother? I already know the answer, and so do you.
And now we have officially entered the excuse-making and blame-shifting phase of the process.
People on social media are saying they didn’t know about the election. They never saw the extensive coverage in the Daily Item. They missed the endless discussions on Facebook. They never looked at the Town’s web site. The didn’t see the conventional and electronic signs posted around town.
It’s probably just as well. Anyone that blissfully unaware wasn’t going to be an informed voter anyway.
The Wakefield Police Department is too professional to allow this to affect how they do their jobs. But they’re human, and this can’t be good for morale.
And if you voted “No” out of spite, because the town “should have done it right the first time” – I hope you’re happy with your vote.
Town Meeting attendance is abysmal as it is — unless some special interest packs the meeting. The police could have done that, but they didn’t. They prevailed the old-fashioned way. They made their best case to the dedicated and informed couple of hundred people who usually attend Town Meeting.
If you voted in Tuesday’s election, you probably were given a sticker that said, “My Vote Counts.”
Now you know why they don’t give those out at Town Meeting.
