The Wright stuff

At last week's TC meeting, Mr. Wright brought up a concern about councilors meeting with Green Power Management. He was pretty vague, but the discussion centered around councilors meeting with this "group" two at a time and he mentioned a conflict of interest.

The council basically danced around this, not fully explaining the issue for people at the meeting or watching from home. They talked about not excluding people from committees who might also have ideas to save the town money. They questioned when and where someone might approach a TC or other committee member and discussed their need to be available to the citizens of Newmarket.

It sounded like a pretty good argument. I certainly want to have access to the council. But the conversation made me wonder, and with very few specifics given at the meeting, I ended up spending a little time researching Green Power Management the next day.

The issue seems to be that Bob Coffey is the CEO of Green Power Management and he is also the chair of the Efficiency Committee. Unfortunately for me I don't read minds, so I'm going to have to make some guesses here. Bob Coffey wants to pitch an idea to the council and rather than doing it once, in front of the entire council with the public viewing, he is choosing to meet with councilors a couple at a time.

I can see where some people might have a problem with this. Personally, I'm conflicted about this. I don't have a problem with someone using their connections to pitch an idea. I don't see anything wrong with someone talking to a couple of councilors to take the temperature of the council as a whole. But something about the way Mr. Wright brought it up made it seem more ominous than that---he mentioned this group meeting with councilors 2 at a time. It sounded organized. Again, I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know exactly where he was going with this, but it seems... questionable.

To confuse the issue, a councilor compared this to meeting a citizen at a cocktail party and that citizen mentions an idea. The question was raised, should we not talk to that person? C'mon. I'm pretty sure that's not what Mr. Wright was saying. Listening to ideas from your constituents is one thing, but organizing a work-around is something very different. And trying to compare those two situations is, in my opinion, dishonest.

Again, I'm not sure where I stand on the (alleged, by me) work-around. What I do know is that it is really easy to bend the rules when you think you're right.