Four thousand times a day, somebody drives across the Champlain Bridge, making it a critical thoroughfare between southern Essex County and Vermont. Some of those people are going to work. Some are keeping important appointments. Some are even traveling for emergency medical care, chemotherapy or dialysis.
Now, the bridge is suddenly declared too decrepit to bear traffic. For many, many people, this is a crisis. They either have to drive hours out of their way or spend hundreds of dollars a month to get to the same place, albeit more slowly, via ferry.
Members of the Essex County Board of Supervisors have been inundated with pleas for help. The bridge must be restored, and pronto.
"This is far, far more than an inconvenience," Ticonderoga Supervisor Robert Dedrick told colleagues at a meeting this week. Some residents have had to quit their jobs because they couldn't get to them.
"I had one family call; they were crying," Westport Supervisor Dan Connell reported.
Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward told legislators a temporary bridge is the only hope.
So the board quickly sent out an SOS to the state and federal governments. State Emergency Management Operations Director John Gibb sped to the Crown Point Bridge Tourism Center to meet with supervisors and others to discuss solutions. At least seven news-media outlets sent reporters to cover this discussion, which would be so crucial to the interests of so many people. Our Kim Smith Dedam was among those reporters.
To everyone's astonishment, Gibb ordered the room cleared of reporters. The meeting was to be private. Dedam protested that, if a quorum were present, it would constitute a public meeting and it would have to be open. (She shouldn't even have had to make that point, as, clearly, information bearing on public fears and frustrations was going to be discussed, quorum or no quorum. Nonetheless, if she was to be forced to stand on ceremony, so be it.)
County Manager Daniel Palmer took a head count and declared the meeting fell short of a quorum. Thus, the meeting legally could be closed, as it wasn't, technically, a meeting at all.
The reporters were dismissed.
Can you imagine any public servant regarding this as the proper way to look after the public's interests? You have residents losing their jobs, crying, flooding their representatives with questions and complaints, and the meeting at which solutions were to be conceived and debated is closed?
If a quorum had been present, the state Freedom of Information Law would have required that the proceedings be conducted for all to see and hear. But, because there was no quorum, a bureaucrat decides to cloak the meeting in secrecy, depriving the public of hope and comfort. This is plainly an abuse of power and an action contrary to the spirit of the law, as well as to common sense.
We earnestly hope a solution is at hand. We'll keep pounding even closed doors until somebody tells us what that solution is.
Opinion
October 21, 2009
EDITORIAL: Closed meeting a public outrage
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