What is there to say about the state of the town of Wellfleet?
In his ode to Eastham last week, Brendan Noonan wrote that the “terrifying” front page of the Independent “is where Wellfleet’s government seems to be in a continuous state of dysfunction or nonexistence.” His tongue was only partly in his cheek.
In this week’s letters, Jeff Tash writes about “the rise of rudeness and hostility at public meetings. People interrupt one another at select board meetings that often run late into the night.” He understates the situation.
The Wellfleet Community Forum has called a meeting for next Monday evening, Feb. 26, with the title “Let Wellfleet’s Voices Be Heard.” It will be moderated by Dan Silverman, which seems like a good idea.
The group’s announcement notes that “Wellfleet just hired its 7th town administrator in the last decade. This constant churn of leadership is no way to run a local government. What is the cause of our town’s troubles?”
There is no simple answer to that question. But one clue came toward the end of the select board’s four-and-a-half-hour meeting on Feb. 6, when the newest member of the board, Tim Sayre, commented on the Community Forum’s earlier proposal to convene an open session on town government.
“Recently there was supposed to be a community forum on ‘the state of the town,’ ” said Sayre. “It didn’t include any of the select board members. It was Sheila Lyons, who only lives in the town…. Those kind of things should be handled by the select board. If you want to hold a ‘state of the town,’ that’s done by us, not by someone that’s not in the town government.”
The Wellfleet Forum has held its traditional “state of the town” session regularly since 2009, many years before Sayre moved here from Florida. The group usually invites the town administrator to be the featured speaker at these events, to talk about the main issues that the community faces and to answer questions from the audience.
This year, of course, the town administrator has just resigned. He said he had to in order to preserve his physical and mental health. The plan, according to the forum’s president, Barnstable County Commissioner Sheila Lyons, had been to ask select board chair Barbara Carboni to speak instead, but that didn’t pan out.
The forum’s board wrote a letter to the select board to inform Sayre about their longstanding civics event. This Monday’s conversation, however, “is an opportunity to show up and communicate your concerns about the performance of the select board and the management of our town’s government” — a new kind of gathering that is not yet an annual tradition. With luck, it could be a chance for longtime and new residents alike to consider becoming more involved in local affairs with a commitment to get work done and not to provoke conflict for conflict’s sake.
At the moment, an obstreperous few are ruling the town, but only because they’re the ones who are showing up.
