To the Editor:<\/p>\n
I fail to understand the level of hostility the editorial board of The Cabinet has displayed towards the Amherst Citizens Association. By referring to the group, of which I am a member, as a \u201csmall group\u201d and the \u201cso-called Amherst Citizens Association\u201d The Cabinet has apparently decided that anyone who questions the actions of our duly elected representatives isn\u2019t deserving of the effort to provide answers.<\/p>\n
Evidently, once our representatives are elected, we the people should remain silent, quietly pay our ever-increasing tax bills, and simply trust that these officials will always act with the best interests of the citizens as their sole motivation. While I certainly hope that this is the case, don\u2019t we as citizens not only have the right but indeed the duty to be eternally vigilant in our oversight of said officials? Isn\u2019t this what the phrase \u201cQuestion Authority\u201d is all about?<\/p>\n
It seems to me that there are quite a few people running around with that very phrase on their bumper but perhaps to The Cabinet that only applies to authority they don\u2019t like. In other cases, simply asking questions is derided as complaining, carping, and \u201ckvetching\u201d.<\/p>\n
Selectman Infanti objected to questions regarding expenditures that were made \u201cthree, four, five, six years ago, when only one person on the board was on it then.\u201d I was not aware that there was a statute of limitations on questionable decisions made by past boards. Imagine if the same limitation applied to our current presidential or congressional races. Are we to believe that once an elected official leaves office we can no longer question decisions made by the governing body they served on?<\/p>\n
I find it especially interesting that Selectman Galinson stated that the time the board spent answering questions from taxpayers regarding town expenditures was \u201cclearly not worth it\u201d and that he \u201cwould not authorize that kind of time\u201d again. For it was Brad himself that attended one of our meetings back in May and invited us to ask these very questions. At that time he seemed eager to have us be more forthcoming with the board as to our concerns. We took him up on it, and now we are told that we were out of line to be asking about how our tax dollars have been spent.<\/p>\n
This should be very disturbing to all the residents of Amherst and readers of The Cabinet.<\/p>\n
Mark Vincent, Amherst<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To the Editor: I fail to understand the level of hostility the editorial board of The Cabinet has displayed towards the Amherst Citizens Association. By referring to the group, of which I am a member, as a \u201csmall group\u201d and the \u201cso-called Amherst Citizens Association\u201d The Cabinet has apparently decided that anyone who questions the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-nh","category-dishonorable"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7036,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions\/7036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}