The nontransparent former chair of the Hartford Selectboard is now pulling the strings of his successor and, together with two veteran Selectboard members, are disrespecting and undermining the head administrators in our town. Add to their ranks a newcomer whose comments in a recent Valley News article were simply naive.
In their never-ending quest to push the “Welcoming Hartford” ordinance, regardless of the possible financial consequences to our town, they have abused another decent man, Town Manager Brannon Godfrey, after similarly abusing Police Chief Phil Kasten. The treatment of Kasten in public forums last year was sickening.
Both Godfrey and Kasten are highly accomplished and well-respected by their staffs and town residents, and not only are they thoughtful and extremely good listeners, they are also genuinely nice people. For them to be treated so unfairly by these elected officials boggles my mind, and it should bother every other fair-minded Hartford resident.
It’s time for this Selectboard to consider taking care of town business first before chasing their utopian visions. We are dealing with some extremely pressing economic conditions now, and many of our taxpaying businesses and residents are going to be struggling for months and possibly years to come.
We need strong leadership from our town manager and our police and fire chiefs, and we don’t need this group of micromanaging Selectboard members chasing away the good people we have in these positions. Although they think they have some kind of mandate, that mandate is to provide good guidance and governance, not to run the town operation. That job is for the town manager.
KEVIN RALEIGH
Hartford
If Jim Kenyon thinks he’ll be able to scale the heights of Simon Dennis (“Scaling the stone wall,” May 3), it’s only because he’s roughly the same height.
While Dennis and I have a lot of political experience in common — we ran together, along with Bethany Fleishman, in 2012, bringing three new votes to the Hartford Selectboard and giving it a leftist bent for the first time — we have a decidedly different understanding of how to work with independent media, and particularly the Valley News. Dennis has adopted the old-fashioned perspective that the newspaper is mainly concerned with stirring up controversy, Kenyon in particular.
My view was and remains that journalists in general (and I exclude from my definition of journalists the opinion writers and content developers for propaganda machines such as Fox for some and MSNBC for others), and particularly the beat reporters covering local municipalities, want desperately to write interesting stories that get all the angles down on paper.
To that end I have always, and have always recommended, that Selectboard members and others who are going to find themselves in the news, such as town managers, should open and maintain lines of communication with those reporters. That means doing things like picking up the phone or sending emails providing background or advance information about developments that are underway and likely to come up.
This winds up having benefits for the public body, the journalists and, most important, the public. Instead of “shock” stories that have incomplete information, the result is informative stories conveying actual news in full context.
If I were still on the Selectboard and had gotten that email from Dennis, my response would have been: “That’s ridiculous! It is part of your duty as an elected official to talk to the reporters. If you don’t want to be quoted, just tell them you will talk about it on background.”
F. X. FLINN
Hartford
The irony of President Donald Trump’s naive, even bizarre, suggestion to inject COVID-19 victims with disinfectant, presumably bleach, is that our white blood cells, as part of our immune system, actually generate bleach (hypochlorous acid and free chlorine) to fight infection.
This remarkable fact has been known since 1996 from research at the University of Washington in the Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology, and Nutrition.
GORDON W.. GRIBBLE
Lebanon
The writer is a Dartmouth College professor of chemistry, emeritus.