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In a closed door meeting convened last week with the town’s four elected land use chairs – Zoning, Zoning Board of Appeals, Planning and Inland Wetlands – First Selectwoman Martha Shoemaker, a Democrat, pointedly accused Nancy Hutchinson, who has no particular affiliation, of leaking to the press.
Paul Orzel, who chairs Zoning and who had the endorsement last election of Democrats and Republicans, joined in the grilling.
Hutchinson, who chairs the Zoning Board of Appeals, did not bend – probably because, to my knowledge, she never talks, or leaks, to the press.
The meeting would be extraordinary, if the stakes weren’t so pedestrian.
In fact, Shoemaker wasn’t even accusing anyone of any wrongdoing, but rather of speaking to the press, and leaking public documents… to the public.
Hutchinson’s prior attempts – by flowchart and diagram – to explain the peculiarities of New England local government to Shoemaker, the realities of dispersed power and elected boards, apparently fell on deaf ears.
What I can report – I don’t think there has been any sort of announcement – is that the land use chairs strongly supported the continued employment of Eric Knapp.
That’s news.
But why do I bring this all up?
Because yesterday for only the third time in five years CT Examiner filed a formal complaint with the state’s Freedom of Information Commission – not against Bridgeport or State Police but against Shoemaker, Town Attorney Jack Collins, and the Town of Old Lyme.
The complaint?
That over a period of months, Shoemaker, with the aid of Collins, has (contrary to the law) withheld and redacted public documents to hide an alleged case of sexual harassment by a town employee, and in the process has enabled that employee to find new employment with a clean record intact.
Not part of that complaint – at least not yet – is a pattern of misbehavior by Shoemaker, according to multiple sources, of repeatedly warning and advising town employees to avoid putting communications and complaints in email form to avoid public scrutiny, and Freedom of Information Law.
The written complaints that we know do exist – an email claiming age discrimination and another by the town’s building official complaining of hundreds of dollars’ worth of gifts from a local business needing approvals for wiring and ventilation – were absent from the handful of documents delivered in response to a June 24 Freedom of Information request.
And the town’s chair of Ethics, oddly, absolved the town on the matter of gifts not by typed letter or email, but by hand-delivered handwritten note, claiming afterward to have disposed of all other documents in the matter.
That’s a first.
Meanwhile, even a simple request for two months of police call logs – a request fulfilled by Norwich, East Lyme and Stonington within a day – has yet to receive a response by Old Lyme after more than two weeks.
I’ve dealt with Democrats and Republicans, Bridgeport and Stamford, but (with the exception maybe of Newington) I can’t recall another town in the state of Connecticut less willing to comply with Freedom of Information law than Old Lyme… and that’s just eight months in office for the current selectwoman.