I’ve been thinking about Van Calhoun’s level of rancor and it seems to me that some of the zoning recommendation committee members, and others who are on the Board feel they have done all this work, for all these years, have all this experience, and now who the hell are we, the inexperienced upstart ignorant rabble, to question the wisdom of what they have put together.
Nevermind that the board members themselves acknowledged over 100 errors in the code.
The telling sentence in Van Calhoun’s recent diatribe, personally attacking Jeanne, for me is: “I watched them work through the problems of creating laws that our people needed but didn’t yet understand.” It’s such a blatantly paternalistic statement that he knows better what We the People need, even if we don’t understand it.
And then there’s “it certainly works on townspeople who do not search for the second sentence of a quote.” Again he portrays an attitude that there are those who are fit to govern and then there are the townspeople.
I think that is the same motivation that led Maria Lull to file the final draft with the County Planning Board before the changes were complete, and without telling the public. They have humored us, put up with us, suffered us, and now they are just sick of us. Van Calhoun thinks Donal, Abi and Vance are out of their depth and he “feels sorry” for them. Patronizing and downright bizarre.
I keep coming back to the code the Board was proud to pass on June 20th, until they acknowledged 100 plus anomalies in July. The difference was the willingness of a number of ’ordinary’ citizens to read the proposed zoning – just read the thing and speak up about all the mistakes.
No matter what the Election outcome, our town should be proud of what we have taken on. This Board is out of line, and it’s time for We the People to put better representation in those seats.
They can’t keep resisting us if they aren’t running our town.
The only way to do that is to vote. There has never been a more important election in Chatham’s history.
Concerned Citizen
Old Chatham
November 1st
