Talking to public officials is a frustrating job. They have a tendency to talk in circles, or in legalese. They sometimes excuse dishonesty by saying that they’re trying to build consensus rather than be divisive. And I get that — to a point.
I cheered when I first heard of Okrent’s Law. Dan Okrent, who lives in Wellfleet more than half the year now, became the first public editor of the New York Times back in 2003 in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. Okrent famously said, in explaining his ombudsman-like role, “The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.”
He was talking about a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the 20 years since he said it: the press devoting ink and airtime to unsupported assertions in an effort to appear even-handed — or, shall we say, “fair and balanced.”
Covering town leaders on the Outer Cape, I see how their attempts to be even-handed (or to save face) do not serve the public good. In Wellfleet, dysfunction brewed in the finance department for years. Lots of people must have known about it, but no one said a word until, suddenly, the state Dept. of Revenue refused to certify the town’s free cash account and a full-blown crisis ensued.
I appreciate Charlie Sumner, who, since coming to Wellfleet as interim town administrator, has delivered monthly blow-by-blow reports of the ongoing discovery of accounting errors literally in the thousands — “peeling away the layers of the onion,” as Sumner puts it. We may not like to hear it. But we cannot solve the problem without knowing there is one.
Darrin Tangeman arrived in Truro as the new town manager in January 2021. The dysfunction in that town is not financial, but it’s just as persistent. It boiled to the surface the other day, as Jasmine Lu reported in last week’s issue of the Independent, when the select board took up the planning board’s proposals for amending the town’s zoning bylaw in preparation for the upcoming town meeting.
Anne Greenbaum, the planning board chair, tried to breeze through the amendments without going “into detail.” She said she wanted to avoid taking up the board’s time. In 2020, she managed to avoid saying a single word of reprimand to her board member Peter Herridge when he called the developer of affordable housing “a little scumbag.” He was censured by the select board.
Tangeman’s reaction to the planning board’s proposals was heartening. He said their intent “was to restrict development and construction on the Walsh property,” the 70-acre town-owned parcel that could be a site for housing. “I’m very concerned,” he told the Independent, “because we have a housing crisis, so why are we trying to turn the Walsh property into a $5 million paperweight?”
Maybe it’s because Tangeman comes from away, or maybe it’s his experience as a military man, but he’s not one of the talkers in circles, and that bodes well for Truro.
