The Real Story of Last Week’s City Council Meeting: A Resolution Calling for City Hall’s Apology

On the morning of their meeting last Tuesday, Newburyport city councillors received a 300-word document from one of the volunteers expelled from the library’s Archival Center.

That evening, they would once again discuss the two-year simmering and now-boiling controversy nearing either resolution or, more likely, being swept under Mayor Sean Reardon’s increasingly lumpy rug.

Under consideration was a strongly-worded resolution, drafted by councillors Connie Preston and Ben Harman, calling for six “corrective actions,” including apologies from the mayor and his top officials at the time, as well as:

… disciplinary action for the librarian who authored and coordinated the letter dated June 6, 2023 for creating a work environment that is inconsistent with the Newburyport Employee Handbook.

After four citizens spoke for the resolution specifically—or for the volunteers generally—Reardon sought to soften the blow by claiming, among other things, that “upon learning” of the 950-word statement charging the then-volunteers with bullying and verbal abuse, “I immediately had it removed” from the NPL website.

This is the same June 6 document to which the Preston-Harman resolution refers.  Published in the Daily News on June 14, 2023, it is—in its transition from a draft aimed at “a single private citizen” to its release aimed at “a small contingent of citizens”—at the heart of the independent investigator’s report.

I do not know when it first appeared on the NPL site, but I first noticed it the night of Monday, June 28. I assumed that airing dirty laundry in public had to be a violation of city policy, and that it was put there by a senior staff librarian acting on her or his own.

At noon the next day, I went to City Hall thinking that I only had to inform someone in the administration of the infraction. A secretary arranged a meeting for me with then-Chief of Staff Andrew Levine two hours later.

Upon my return, the mayor walked out the door calling back to me: “Quite a letter you had in the paper!” My letter had been in defense of the volunteers, but submitted days before I saw the document on the NPL site.

My meeting with Levine lasted about 15 minutes, but it could have ended in 15 seconds.  Not only did he not see anything wrong with the post, but he approved of it. Incredulous, I kept reframing the question in terms of dirty laundry, the fact of it being a city-sponsored site, and a line saying that the volunteers “accepted money” from patrons that turned out to be nothing more than coins for a photocopier—something left out of investigator’s report. In return, I got blank stares.

The document, including the charge regarding “money”—with its implicit insinuation that the vols were exploiting their roles for profit—remained on the NPL site for at least three more weeks.

Said Levine, flatly: “There’s no insinuation.”

All of this raises questions about the mayor’s claim on Tuesday.  Is it plausible that a chief-of-staff would not brief a mayor on such a meeting? The mayor knew that the meeting took place, and he knew that I was writing in the Daily News about the library issue.

Put another way, is it plausible that the mayor would not ask his chief-of-staff to tell him what the meeting was about?  If the answer to either question is yes, then the only other conclusion to be drawn is that the mayor is using the office of chief-of-staff for plausible deniability.

Anyone my age will recall that Orwellian term from the Nixon years: “Plausible deniability,” a loophole for a lie.

Meanwhile, the volunteer who sent the council that 300-page statement was in attendance. One might wonder if the councillors, while hearing Reardon emphasize the facade of “no winners or losers here,” recalled the testimony she gave them earlier that day: 

[Reardon’s] statement that there are no winners or losers here is not true: Then, and still now, the city administration and the instigator of the original letter, who is now the director of the much-altered archives, are the winners. Because he does not accept the findings of the investigation, the volunteers and the former archivist are the losers.

But more: What must they have thought of the mayor’s claim the he was “obliged to investigate” while, right behind him, they saw the face of a woman who had just written this:

The statement that he met with both sides is deceptive: Six weeks after he shut down the archive volunteers’ program, [two of the volunteers] were finally successful in getting a meeting for all the volunteers with him… At the meeting the volunteers had one request: Ask the 14 librarians why they would sign such a hateful, untrue letter. He refused, saying he had to believe 14 librarians and would not question them.

That last line may seem like old news, but that’s the point:  Anyone following this story knows that Reardon never began an investigation, much less held one. But now he calls an investigation that never happened an “obligation” while he “disagrees with” the investigation that did.

Just when we might ask if it could get any worse, Reardon finished reading his formal statement, and “to piggyback on it,” added this:

I did meet with my good friend, Liz Walsh—and she is my friend—last week, and I really appreciate her coming in…

Not a word about what was said at that week-old meeting was added, just the impression created by the repetition of “friend,” as he turned to the seats behind him hoping for a nod of approval from the woman he named.

Poor guy! He had no way of knowing about the 300-word document she gave the councillors that very morning.

Jack Garvey
Newbury resident

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