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Dear Editor and fellow Reading residents,
I wonder if you were as flummoxed as I was upon watching last night’s Select Board meeting and seeing the board vote 3-1 to hire an outside investigator to investigate Board members and residents in conjunction with the resignation of Jackie McCarthy from the Board. The Select Board has no authority to investigate residents. Let’s remember, this all started with member Chris Haley vaguely accusing fellow member Mark Dockser of some unstated wrongdoing leading to Ms. McCarthy’s resignation. If the Board feels that the conduct of its own members should be investigated, it is their choice to submit to that. They can investigate whether any Board member threatened Ms. McCarthy or otherwise attempted to coerce her to change her vote on the topic of hiring a new Town Manager. They can also investigate whether they violated their own code of conduct or other policies in the meetings following the resignation. But if some random resident(s) threatened Ms. McCarthy, that is a private matter between her and the resident(s). If she felt seriously threatened she should have filed a police report, or a complaint with an appropriate authority. Since she did not do this, nor did she ask the Select Board to investigate any of this, it remains a private matter, and certainly not within the purview of any investigation of the Board and its members.
I appreciated member Karen Herrick’s attempts to make this point repeatedly during the meeting — that residents have a protected right to contact their elected officials, and the Select Board and an outside investigator don’t get to police what is said in those communications. The original calls for an investigation seemed focused on members of the Select Board, but now we are seeing “mission creep” and a serious infringement on residents’ rights as a result. Ms. McCarthy even wrote in a recent letter about possible participation in a “properly scoped” investigation. Including residents seems well beyond any proper scope. I encourage everyone to see this for the government overreach and waste of taxpayer dollars that it is, and let the Board know you’d like them to leave Ms. McCarthy, now a private citizen, alone and move forward with the actual business of the town.
Rebecca Bailey
Forest Glen Road
Precinct 1 Town Meeting member
