LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Selectmen confused about their jobs? To the editor: The swirl on the street is that the selectmen, stung from their rejection by Richard Reinhard, are going back to square one to re-advertise the town manager position. I’m not sure what they think that will accomplish. After such a long process of looking for and then vetting applicants, they had narrowed it down to a handful of candidates. Will more folks suddenly come pouring out of the woodwork, dying to work in a sometimes contentious but always interesting, highly priced place to live that offers few work opportunities for family members? That seems so counter-intuitive when their second choice — who in my opinion should have been their first choice — was a woman who already has a place to live on the Outer Cape and doesn’t have to overcome that hurdle. Her family won’t need to try to carve out a successful life here, they already have one, and, most importantly, she has worked in a variety of capacities for and with the town for many years, including a stint as interim town manager, and performed each and every task set to her well and with little drama. Michelle Jarusiewicz is uniquely positioned to take on the job and do it well. I hear that during her interview she failed to toss up enough razzle-dazzle in her approach. I don’t think razzle-dazzle is what the town needs. It has real problems, hard problems. The whole country is going through a version of similar issues, and what the town needs is a board of selectmen who understand their job — to consider the big picture and make policy leading toward a better future — and a town manager who understands and does his or her job — to execute the policy leading to change that is set by the selectmen while making the various town departments run smoothly. Would the voters need to decide that it’s OK for the manager to live outside the city limits in order to hire Jarusiewicz? Yes, but in today’s real world that should be a no-brainer. That’s a very small, doable action that would automatically broaden the town’s choices in this and future hires. It seems as if the selectmen would like to abdicate their own jobs in favor of someone from out of town who will come in and pull solution rabbits out of the hat. Not that the town doesn’t need creative, out-of-the-box thinking to find solutions to its problems; it does. But it needs a manager, not a mayor. From recent decisions, however, it almost appears as if that’s whom the selectmen would like to hire. The town has been too long without a permanent manager, too long without a permanent police chief and too long without a definite hand on the rudder. (Kudos to Assistant Town Manager David Gardner and Lt. Jim Golden — both have taken on a tremendous amount of additional work and done terrific interim jobs.) It is time for someone to get to the business of running the town and taking it forward, and there is a strong candidate standing in the door. Shouldn’t we embrace this opportunity? Sue Harrison Fort Lauderdale & Provincetown [ Editor’s note: Sue Harrison was the longtime arts editor at the Banner. She was a full-time resident from 1970-2010, served on several boards, and now resides in Provincetown part time.]
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 10:48:14 +0000
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