An open letter to town residents

What happened to Longmeadow.org?
Here is some background….

In a series of emails from Select Board member Rob Aseltine in early June (before the town elections) the Longmeadow.org volunteer webmaster (that’s me) was charged with having a serious conflict of interest by being the town webmaster and posting of my personal opinions on the Longmeadow Buzz blog. Mr. Aseltine’s contention was that my personal opinions affected what I was willing to post with regard to the high school building project on the School Building Committee (SBC) website which I developed and maintained as a volunteer.

The LongmeadowBuzz blog was created 2½ years ago as an open forum for discussion of local topics of interest to Longmeadow residents. LongmeadowBuzz is a privately owned and moderated blog to which there was a “link” from the Longmeadow.org website. It is not supported financially or in any other manner by the town of Longmeadow. All town residents and town employees can participate. It is clearly and prominently stated on the blog that all opinions are strictly those of the listed author and do not represent official town policy.

Contrary to Mr. Aseltine’s assertions, there were no documented incidents which show that I censored, filtered or refused to post any high school building project related documents on the SBC or Longmeadow.org websites. All information "above and beyond" what was expected including web videos of public forums and LHS tours were posted in a timely manner- some of which were at my expense. The personal opinions that I expressed on the Longmeadow Buzz blog did not influence this effort.

Anyone who has followed this heated discussion and is familiar with the situation knows that the issue was not about the Longmeadow.org or the SBC websites or how they were maintained. The issue was about access for town residents to information and commentary not found on the town sponsored website (Longmeadow.org). As long as my LongmeadowBuzz posts were consistent with the “Vote YES” message advocated by the SBC, there was no conflict of interest. As soon as my commentary indicated a lack of support for the new high school project with criticism of certain town leaders, LongmeadowBuzz became a “conflict of interest” and the Longmeadow.org webmaster was targeted for removal.

Where does the Town of Longmeadow go from here? You are probably curious if you have recently visited Longmeadow.org.

It is clear that the posting of the November 2009 MSBA/ SBC letters + my critical commentary about the lack of truthfulness and transparency by certain town officials and employees on the Longmeadow Buzz (click to read --> Now is the time!) caused this town website controversy.When asked to remove all links to LongmeadowBuzz from Longmeadow.org on July 14, they were quickly removed without objection. This was first time that any directive about the links (or any other links) had been given by the Select Board or Town Manager.

1. Select Board Chair Aseltine has already made good on his threat to remove me as volunteer town webmaster (effective July 26). The website is now “under renovation” and the Select Board and the Town Manager are now assessing plans to fill the gap that has been created.
   
   With the state legislature now mandating increasing amounts of town government information to be posted on town websites, the town will likely be required to spend a significant amount of time and resources supporting the town website.
2. Communication of information to town residents in Longmeadow is now being compromised. Press releases for Town Government and School Department are no longer being sent to LongmeadowBiz for posting on the Town Calendar and Longmeadow Community Bulletin Board even though a formal request was made to add LongmeadowBiz as one of the local media outlets. Both of these web resources have become important means of communication within our town over the past few years.

3. An alternative website has been created at www.LongmeadowMA.org  as the new home for community related content. My volunteer efforts for the benefit of town residents will continue. As in the past I am offering free webpage/ website support (including website hosting) for selected Longmeadow community groups and organizations (e.g., Gardeners on the Green, Longmeadow Historical Society, etc.). If a local Longmeadow group or organization is interested, please send an email request with contact details to webmaster@LongmeadowMA.org .
4. Carl Sturgis, Storrs Library Director, had earlier accepted my offer of unlimited free website support for the library and its staff but he has now said “thanks, but no thanks”. Mr. Sturgis has now indicated that he will rely upon library staff to support their website. Given the events of the past few weeks, it’s not too difficult to guess what happened for the change of mind.

Bottom line….
The reality here is that Rob Aseltine has disconnected town government and all of its departments (including Storrs Library) from the free Internet resources that have been enjoyed for many years. Mr. Aseltine has decided that it is far more important to control the information and message from Town Hall than to have open and transparent government.

I believe that this is not the direction that Longmeadow needs to be heading!

If you concerned about this new direction, please send your comments to the Select Board and the Town Manager. Their official email address are shown below:

Robert Aseltine- raseltine@longmeadow.org
Robert Barkett- rbarkett@longmeadow.org  
Christine Swanson- cswanson@longmeadow.org
Paul Santaniello- psantaniello@longmeadow.org
Mark Gold- mgold@longmeadow.org

Thank you for reading this letter. Longmeadow is a great town!
Let’s keep it that way.

Town residents can rest assured that LongmeadowBiz.com, LongmeadowBuzz and LongmeadowMA.org will not disappear.

An old story...

From the beginning, www.longmeadow.org which was created by volunteers in 1997 was designed to be a community based website... not an "official town government" website.  

In 1997 the domain name for an official town government website in Massachusetts should have been www.longmeadow.ma.us which was a reserved name. Today, cities and towns in Massachusetts use the .gov extension- e.g. http://www.longmeadow.gov/.  Such a domain name authenicates the website as an "official government" website since these are reserved names for federal agencies, state governments, cities and towns.  For the record there are a few other cities/towns in Massachusetts still using the .org extension for their town websites.  Robin Crosbie at the July 12 Select Board meeting suggested to the SB that they consider a name change to the .gov extension.

The home page title for www.Longmeadow.org had always been "Welcome to the Town of Longmeadow, Massachusetts".  Now the page title reads "The New Official Town Government Website for the Town of Longmeadow, Massachusetts".

In March 1999- about 1½ years after Longmeadow.org was launched there was an attempt by the Select Board- chaired by Hal Haberman with Jerry Nolet and Arlene Miller as the other two Select Board members to convert www.longmeadow.org to an "official town government" website.  This action met considerable resistance from co-webmasters Jim Moran and Mark Gold who made a counter proposal for privatization to keep it a community website. The proposal was later withdrawn after the Select Board decided to allow the website to remain as a community website. [click here to view full article]

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About 2½ years ago in March 2008, I was interviewed on the LCTV weekly show called Around Town by host Arlene Miller.  The discussion included the workings of the town websites including  Longmeadow.org and LongmeadowBiz.com and a new entity called the LongmeadowBuzz blog.  It is worthwhile to listen to Ms. Miller's personal comments about the value of our town websites- particularly given her skepicism some nine years earlier.  Below is a video replay of the interview courtesy of LCTV.

Our Town with Arlene Miller- LCTV

Payback in Town Politics

Longmeadow News- July 29, 2010

In case you missed it, here is Alex Grant's "Payback in Town Politics" that appeared in last week's edition of the Longmeadow News (with permission of the author and thanks to the Longmeadow News).
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In hindsight, it was probably a mistake for me to censor Jerold Duquette for a specific post relating to Mark Gold's positions given my strong support for his candidacy. However, I felt that Mr. Duquette's unrelenting assault on personal integrity and his lack of respect for dissenting opinion for Mr. Gold and other members of our community demanded that I remove his privileges. As I mentioned on the Buzz in a previous post, I gave Mr. Duquette numerous warnings on prior Buzz posts and I could never trust him to post without monitoring the content.  I should have banned his participation on the Buzz after some of his earlier posts. Mr. Duquette had already been banned once on the Longmeadow MassLive forum- something that is pretty difficult to achieve and I was not going to allow his rhetoric to make the Buzz an extension of the MassLive forum.

Since last Monday's unprecedented takeover of the town website by the Longmeadow Select Board, the situation has deteriorated significantly with the website currently "under renovation".  While I'm obviously not involved with the plans for the "renovated town website" I am confident that the new town website I created at www.LongmeadowMA.org will prosper.  I am planning to reallocate a large portion of my volunteer time toward the support, maintenance and upgrade of the Online Storrs Library (http://www.longmeadowma.org/library/index.html) which I helped create over the past 13 years.

Given the ugly rhetoric against NO supporters that occurred during the high school building project, I would not be surprised to see some strongly worded rebuttal "letters to the editor" of Alex Grant's opinion column in upcoming issues of the Longmeadow News and The Reminder.

Something to remember...

This controversy about the website is about OPEN and TRANSPARENT government not a continuation of the School Building Project debate.

Food for Thought

Given all of the political flack that I have received from three members of the Select Board about the Longmeadow Buzz blog and the links to it from the town website, it's interesting that the State of Massachusetts allows a link to following blog from the homepage of the official State website.
 
At Issue and InFocus- The Official Blog of the Massachusetts Attorney General- Martha Coakley http://blog.ago.state.ma.us/blog/

Guidelines from the front page of this state sponsored and approved blog include...

Comment Policy
We welcome your participation in this blog and we hope you will share your ideas, your encouragement, and your experience with fellow readers. Dissenting points of view are welcome, but we ask that you be respectful of our contributors, readers and participants.  By commenting to this blog, you agree to the terms of this policy. The AGO reserves the right to change this policy at any time, without notification.

This is a moderated blog. Comments are welcome at any time, but they will generally be reviewed and posted within regular business hours (Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.). Please do not resubmit your comment if it does not appear right away.  All submitted comments are subject to review and approval by the AGO’s blog moderators before they will be posted.
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I would expect that the Massachusetts AGO would probably have moderated (censored) many (if not all) of Jerold Duquette's posts that have appeared on LongmeadowBuzz for objectionable content if they had been submitted to the state sponsored AGO blog.
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As Alex Grant pointed out in his Opinion column (Payback in Town Politics) published in this week's edition of the Longmeadow News, the LongmeadowBuzz blog was not the town website.  He doubted that anyone was mislead to believe that the town website and the Buzz blog were one and the same thing.
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The fact of the matter is that there obviously needs to be some guidelines for the town website about acceptable links.  The State of Massachusetts must approve of the above AGO's blog link because there is a prominent link to it on the official state website (see link at top right hand side on www.mass.gov, Connecting with Us).

No specific guidelines for content or links have ever been formally established for the Longmeadow town website. 

However, the existence of links from the "official" town website to the Buzz blog for over two years without objection would appear to be implicit approval by the Select Board.  As mentioned in a previous post there had been no request from the Select Board for removal of the LongmeadowBuzz link until July 14, 2010 and it was quickly removed without objection.

The Audacity of Volunteering

First, thank you, Jim Moran, for your many years of service to the town. Your foresight, initiative and just plan hard work has provided us with a website that was informative, complete, easily navigable and attractive. Thanks for the pictures, the articles, the buzz, the biz. Thanks for tracking down unposted minutes of governmental bodies. Thanks for demanding accuracy and completeness from reluctant public officials. This was not a .gov website. This was a .org website, a non-profit venture more like a newspaper than a town report. And, it was clearly a labor of love, not just love of government but love of Longmeadow.

The actions of the Longmeadow Select Board in publicly chastising you and then “firing” you from your unpaid volunteer work as webmaster are purely political. This was no calm discussion of content and links. It was not a desire to give more work to the town’s lone IT person. It was punishment because you did not support the school building project. And, furthermore, you had the audacity to print (here on this blog at longmeadowbuzz.blogspot.com) 6-month old official correspondence about the project that raised serious questions, correspondence that had been obtained through a Freedom of Information request by another town group.

I wish you the best of luck in your new venture, longmeadowMA.org. I know it will be as reasoned and responsible as you have always been. A little more audacity would be okay too.


Kathy Grady

Insubordinate Volunteer?

During the July 12 Longmeadow Select Board meeting (see previous posting for video clip of discussion) it was made very clear by Chairman Rob Aseltine that there was a need for a significant revamping of the Longmeadow.org town website and institution of new policy guidelines for allowable website content and links.

Key discussion points made by SB members at this meeting included:
1. The town website should primarily reflect the official business of the Town of Longmeadow.
2. There should be no links or connections to any business related ventures.
3. Inclusion of any non-town government related groups should be considered on a case-by-case basis.

With my normal rapid response to website issues and problems that I have demonstrated over the past 13 years, I spent a considerable number of hours during the past two weeks (of course, in my volunteer capacity at no cost to the town) separating the Longmeadow.org website into two entities in anticipation of some new guidelines

1. http://www.longmeadow.org/ - the new official Town Government website with a new masthead reflecting a new focus. All of the information related to Town Government was left untouched and easily accessible.

[click above to enlarge]

2. http://www.longmeadowma.org/ - a newly created privately supported website for all of the components that probably didn’t belong on Longmeadow.org given the strongly expressed views of the majority of the Select Board.

The website changes were made on Sunday night so as not to cause any inconvenience or confusion to town residents and was online Monday morning with an explanation as to what happened.

For the past thirteen years that I have been maintaining the town website as a unpaid volunteer, website changes have been made without the need for any formal approval
…. even today, there are no policy guidelines in place so I didn’t feel that I needed any approval.

What happened on Monday morning was completely unexpected given my best intentions and the situation quickly got out of hand… The Select Board Chairman issued a direct order to regain control of the website which meant changing the password for the town website server and the webmaster@longmeadow.org  email account. This happened by 10 am Monday morning. By the end of the Select Board meeting Monday night, Jim Moran had been officially removed as town webmaster for becoming an “insubordinate volunteer”. Interestingly enough, there was no attempt on Monday morning or any time during the remainder of the day to communicate by phone or email to inquire as to what had happened.

Below is a video clip (courtesy of LCTV) of the Select Board discussion.




Longmeadow Select Board- 7/26/10

Anyone who has followed this heated discussion and is familiar with the situation knows that the issue was not about the town website and how it was maintained. The issue was about removing easy access to information not readily available on the town website (namely the LongmeadowBuzz blog). Anyone who says otherwise is not familiar with all of the facts.

It is interesting that the link to the LongmeadowBuzz blog which has caused all of this furor has been on the town website for about 2½ years. Only when information and commentary about some town officials and employees involved about the High School Building Project was posted on LongmeadowBuzz did it ignite the current heated debate. When asked to remove all links to LongmeadowBuzz from the town website on July 14, they were quickly removed without objection.  There had been no request to remove the LongmeadowBuzz link by the Select Board or Town Manager prior to July 14.
.................

Now that the Select Board chair Aseltine has successfully removed me as town webmaster…

Will his next move be to have my name removed from the plaque in the Longmeadow Town Hall recognizing my selection as Citizen of the Year for 2005 for my outstanding community service work on the town website?

Conflict of Interest?

The Longmeadow.org webmaster (that’s me) was charged last month in a series of emails from Rob Aseltine as having a serious conflict of interest by being the town webmaster and posting of personal opinion here on the Longmeadow Buzz blog. Mr. Aseltine’s contention was that these personal opinions affected what I was willing to post with regard to the high school building project on the town website.

During last week’s Select Board meeting (7/12/10), Mr. Barkett cited visible links to the LongmeadowBuzz blog on the town website as both “confusing to the public” and “unvetted opinion”. For Mr. Barkett’s edification there are also very prominent links on the town website to LCTV…. and anyone who decides to follow them will be quickly led to the LCTV's program videos of “Put Up Your Duqs” (PUYD) by Jerold Duquette- the content of which certainly meets the same criteria. Should we also remove the LCTV link from the town website?

This past week Mr. Aseltine demanded that all links to the LongmeadowBuzz blog be removed from Longmeadow.org as soon as possible and they were removed without objection. Interestingly enough, the LongmeadowBuzz blog has been in existence for over 2½ years and this is first time that any directive about the links has been given by the Select Board.

In support of Mr. Aseltine’s “conflict of interest” assertion, Christine Swanson- co-chair of the SBC outlined one “example” during last week’s SB discussion that involved a delay in posting event information relating to a planned School Building Committee tour of Longmeadow HS.

From my webmaster email records, here is the timeline...

1. SBC request by Ms. Swanson- Thursday night, May 13 at 10:58 PM
2. Second request asking why the announcement had not yet been posted- Saturday night at 6:05 PM
3. Email response by webmaster on Sunday night at 9:33 PM indicating that he was out of town at a family wedding starting Thursday morning and would post the announcement Monday morning.
4. Announcement was posted on the Longmeadow.org homepage, the SBC website and the Town Calendar on Monday morning at 10 AM for maximum visibility.

Perhaps, better planning by the SBC and Ms. Swanson would have provided greater lead time for publicizing this event. Even if the town website was “professionally managed” as is being suggested, it is not likely that Ms. Swanson would have received a quicker response. This is a pretty weak example of a significant “conflict of interest”.

As far as I am aware there have been no incidents which will show that I censored, filtered or refused to post any school building project related documents on the SBC or town websites. In one example refuting this accusation, I worked very diligently trying to obtain SBC meeting minutes so that they could be posted on the SBC website in a timely manner to keep town residents updated about this important project. However, in many cases, there were delays of up to 3 months before SBC meeting minutes were sent to me for posting despite my numerous requests for them.

All information "above and beyond" what was expected was posted on the School Building Committee website in a timely fashion. My personal opinions expressed here on the Buzz did not influence this effort.

As I have mentioned in prior posts, it was the posting of the November 2009 MSBA/ SBC correspondence on the Buzz (Now is the time!) that caused this latest town website controversy. In a Springfield-Channel 3 interview on June 3, 2010,  Jahn Hart, Superintendent of Schools stated that these letters had been public information since November when they were received. If that were the case, why did it take an appeal by Roger Wojcik and his group to the Massachusetts Attorney General under the Freedom of Information Act before these letters were released to the public?  There was virtually no mention of the content of these letters in published meeting minutes.  I believe that the content of these letters state volumes as to the reasons why the letters were withheld from the general public. “That is my personal opinion”.

The new Massachusetts Open Meeting Law that started July 1, 2010 imposes significantly more documentation requirements on town committees and boards including civil penalties and fines up to $1000 for each intentional violation. Perhaps, if this law had been in effect last November, these MSBA/SBC letters would have been required to be public record and easily accessible at the Town Clerk's office in the Longmeadow Town Hall.

A final point… with the Select Board now actively considering action to revamp management of the town website (primarily, in response to my LongmeadowBuzz activity) I believe that two Select Board members (Barkett and Swanson) should abstain from voting on any decision because of the obvious conflict of interest on their part- they are the School Building Committee co-chairs involved with this incident.

Are you confused yet?

After listening to the discussion at Monday night's Select Board meeting, you might have become confused as to what is the town website, the Buzz, etc.  Here is a cheat sheet for LongmeadowBuzz followers...

The “town websites” as they were collectively called during the meeting include:

1. www.Longmeadow.org
   
   This website is the only “official” town website. It was created by group of volunteer residents led by Jim Moran during the summer/fall of 1997. Over the past 13 years it has grown to become an important resource for our town. There is not much information about our town that cannot be found on www.longmeadow.org/.
   
   The Town of Longmeadow pays only for the web hosting and annual domain name registration that is valued at estimated $100/ year.  Jim Moran provides ~90% of the daily effort required in order to make sure that the posted information is timely and frequently updated. Mark Gold provides the other 10%.  "Volunteer” time required for annual maintainance/ upgrades of this website is estimated to be at least 750 hours and valued at least $25K/year.
   
   In the past year a large additional amount of “volunteer” time was committed toward the creation and maintainence of  the School Building Committee website. This included the timely posting of web videos for 24/7 viewing and any other information that was requested by School Building Committee.
   
   On www.Longmeadow.org you will find links to many other websites including LCTV, Bay Path College, Longmeadow Historical Society and LEEF.  For other groups such as LongMeddowe Days, Gardeners on the Green as well as the various committee and boards, there are custom webpages that have been created for their use in communicating with town residents.
   
   I estimate that over the past 13 years I have contributed close to 7500 hours of volunteer effort (at an estimated value of at least $200-250K) in the design and maintenance of the town website. This $$ value does not include the cost of computer hardware and software and other costs incurred by me with the operation of the town website.
2. www.LongmeadowBiz.com
   
   This website is privately owned (by me) and provides a wealth of information and free web based resources to town residents including the Longmeadow Community Bulletin Board (including Town Notices), Town Calendar, free classified ads, etc. It existence is supported by local business advertising and there is absolutely no financial support by the town of Longmeadow. The income from the LongmeadowBiz.com website helps pay for the expenses incurred with the Longmeadow.org website.
   
   As with the Longmeadow.org website, there are no personal opinions or other such information posted on the LongmeadowBiz.com website. Again, there are many links to other websites that can be found on this website including the LongmeadowBuzz blog.
3. LongmeadowBuzz Blog
   
   Below is the message posted on every page of this blog (it is not a website).
   
   LongmeadowBuzz is an open forum for discussion of local topics of interest to the residents of Longmeadow, Massachusetts. There will be no discussion of topics related to state or national politics because there are many other forums for such discourse. In this forum there are already a number of invited contributors who are town residents or town officials or both. If someone is interested in contributing an article to the forum, simply send a request to LongmeadowBuzz@comcast.net  with your name and address and you will receive an invitation to join. Anyone can post a comment to a posting but we would like to disencourage anonymous entries. All comments on this forum are moderated to eliminate objectionable content.
   
   The LongmeadowBuzz blog is not supported financially or in any other manner by the town of Longmeadow and all opinions are strictly those of the listed author and do not represent official town policy.

I hope that the above information provides some useful understanding of the web based resources that we have in Longmeadow.

Select Board Chair Follows Through on Threat

During the months of May and June and prior to the new High School Building decision on June 8 there was intense debate about the merits of the project, particularly with regard to "renovation" vs. "new".  On June 6, I wrote a LongmeadowBuzz article entitled "Now is the Time!" in which I published a series of letters between the MSBA and the Longmeadow School Building Committee in which the MSBA urged the SBC to reconsider the renovation option since some of the premises of the original estimates were faulty.  Even though these letters were written in November 2009, they were not made public until obtained by Phil Fregeau in early June 2010 through the Freedom of Information Act.

Given that I had created and maintained the SBC website (located at www.Longmeadow.org/sbc) I knew that these documents had not been made public and the SBC meeting minutes published during this period did not divulge the contents of the letters including the MSBA's large concern about the original renovation options that were considered.  In my posting, I criticized the SBC co-chairs (Mr. Barkett and Ms. Swanson) and asked for openness and transparency in town government... this episode clearly demonstrated that we had neither. 

During last night's Select Board meeting, SelectBoard chair, Rob Aseltine made good on a prior threat (made through a series of strongly worded emails) to consider other town website alternatives as a response to this posting on the LongmeadowBuzz blog.  In other words, eventually remove me as the town webmaster.

Below is a short video (courtesy of LCTV) of the Select Board discussion that occurred.




 Click to view video

May 25th Town Meeting Presentation

Given the overwhelming support for the Longmeadow High School Building project at the Town Meeting on May 25th, 2010, Superintendent Hart did not give her presentation.

LCTV was kind enough to tape the presentation by Ms. Hart and SBC Co-Chair Bobby Barkett for those residents that are interested in learning more about the project.

For additional information please see the SBC website at www.longmeadow.org/sbc

Remember to VOTE yes for LHS on Jum 8th!

http://www.mydeo.com/videorequest.asp?XID=18031&CID=298844

Christine Swanson
Co-Chair SBC