City Hall’s Mistreatment of Municipal Volunteers and Employees is Becoming a Trend
Opinion PieceThe Townie is an opinion website. The views expressed in this piece belong solely to the author, and do not represent those held by The Townie.
“This has created a toxic work environment. I’m afraid to speak up. I’m afraid to defend myself, especially with what I’ve read about the library incident. I feel like it’s going down the same path.”
-Mary Jo Haley, Parking Enforcement Supervisor, May 5
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If you want relief from all the wrecking ball news from the White House in Washington, you’ll need to avoid the serial implosions from City Hall in Newburyport. Team Trump has nothing on Team Reardon when it comes to disappearing, dismantling, and disabling public services, not to mention demoralizing public servants.
On Wednesday last week, the Daily News’ front page headline blared:
Investigator: Newburyport library volunteers defamed by city officials
The story reports the City Council’s release of the conclusion reached by an independent investigator, including two most shocking, if carefully worded, lines:
… the actions and inaction of the City, through the Mayor, the Mayor’s [former] Chief of Staff and the Human Resources Director, directly contributed to or created the situation that allowed for (the volunteers’) dismissal and defamation.
Followed by:
The public release of the librarians’ letter without any context or investigation acted as an endorsement of the allegations included in the letter, many of which they were aware were false or misleading.
Next day, the DN’s top front-page headline was more restrained:
City clerk reveals tensions with mayor
“Tensions”? Members of the clerk’s office sounded like they were caught in a medieval vice pleading for the council to intervene in “a hostile work environment.” One fought back tears describing “retaliation” for not fixing parking tickets issued for vehicles in handicapped spaces.
After 14 years in her position with a clean record and praise from both former and present City Clerks, Parking Enforcement Officer Mary Jo Haley was suddenly the subject of two complaints, one from a 49-time offender, regarding tickets the mayor wanted dismissed.
No wonder she was reminded of Mayor Fix-it’s butchery of the library. Head Archivist Sharon Spieldenner had a clean record and praise from numerous researchers, resulting in her being cited in the acknowledgements of some 30 books. So went her first dozen years before Reardon “paused” the volunteer program.
Soon after, she has three disciplinary write-ups.
The investigator’s report reveals the mayor’s retaliation against local historian Ghlee Woodworth, an occupation that makes her a natural friend of an archivist. How that ballooned into the resignation of his own newly-appointed NPL director, the dismissal of all archival volunteers, and Spieldenner’s forced resignation, I’ll leave to the report.
After all, City Council President Ed Cameron said that an “executive summary” will be released this week, and as one of the signers of the petition, I should abide the process—unless it’s white-washed.
Then again, why did it take seven weeks before we heard anything of a report dated March 19?
Seven weeks? That’s nothing. Cameron stalled the start of the investigation six months, giving the then-Chief of Staff Andrew Levine time to bail out. He did more to spread the defamation more than anyone else. Though they knew of it, the mayor and Human Resources Director Donna Drelik looked the other way. No sooner did Levine announce that he was moving to Western Massachusetts, than voila! Time to investigate!
The mayor must have blindly thought that all blame could be pinned on his former donkey.
As if to oblige him, the council’s “executive” summary, released just last night, omits any mention of Reardon’s targeting of Woodworth, thereby hiding the petty, political motive that has consumed NPL. As for the boiling turmoil in the clerk’s office, see it for yourself in last week’s meeting of a subcommittee of the City Council.
The video is about an hour and a half. Start at the 50-minute mark when the recently retired City Clerk testifies that he enjoyed a professional working relationship with previous mayors for most of his 18 years in City Hall.
That ended, he says, about three years ago. Richard Jones then urged the council to intercede, reminding them that the clerk’s office reports to the council, not to the mayor.
The current mayor is then described by the new City Clerk:
I pass him in the hallway. I say hello to him. I greet him, and he walks by me like I am invisible.
Added Haley, who works out of the Clerk’s office:
I feel I have a target on my back, and I’m afraid of being retaliated against by the mayor’s office again.
On Friday, the day after news of the Clerk’s office exploded, readers of The Townie had a taste of the library report finding regarding the personal impact of the Reardon Administration’s abuse of power. In an essay that might simultaneously induce tears and rage, a daughter of a volunteer in the Archival Center every Friday morning for eight years, writes:
I’m not sure I will ever be able to understand why my mother was subjected to an un-American “guilty until proven innocent” nightmare for the past two years.
On the same day, a White House advisor openly said that the administration is considering ways to eliminate the constitutional right of habeas corpus for those they want to deport. In plain English, that means people would be guilty as soon as charged.
In Newburyport, it means that the city is now a microcosm of our national macrospasm in more ways than one.
Jack Garvey is a frequent contributor to The Townie. He lives in Newbury.
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Has become No visible changes. City Council President Ed Cameron is allegedly complicit. When will 14 staffers who signed the defamatory statement be discharged? Employee Handbook lists defaming and conduct unbecoming as reasons for termination of employment. Anyone? Anyone?
Calling for the wholesale firing of 14 public servants who stood up for themselves in public? Seems to me it’s the former volunteers and not the Mayor who are acting like Trump and his DOGE cronies. Once again, I’ll take the word of fourteen library employees over a politically motivated and biased report that interviewed a whopping eleven people to reach its conclusions. Considering that’s three fewer than the number of librarians that signed the letter and the volunteers were characterized as “eager to be heard and share their experience,” I’m willing to bet I know in which direction the make-up of that eleven skewed. That’s not even getting into the fact that the Head Librarian was not interviewed as part of this report. How do you reach a conclusion about whether a person was bullied without hearing from the person in question? Whether she wanted to participate is irrelevant – this should automatically disqualify any result other than “inconclusive.” Beyond that, the summary of the report seems to dismiss bullying based on a subjective opinion on what that would entail, saying that “to respond to the same inquires repeatedly and to have other work suffer” should be an expected outcome. To me, that’s a ridiculous statement to make wholesale without considering degree. To have inquiries made to you on a repeated-enough basis to have work suffer sounds a lot like harassment to my ears.