Wednesday, July 28, 2010

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

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