Town Meeting is on again
Published on June 18th, 2003
STONEHAM, MA - For Stoneham residents Edie Previdi and Terri Ghannam, it was all about the principle.
Standing before the Board of Selectmen last night in Town Hall's Auditorium with 235 certified signatures from registered voters, they forced the Selectmen to finish what they had started two weeks ago - to call a Special Town Meeting to address a controversial $5 transfer from Town Moderator Michael Rotondi's operating budget to personnel.
"Believe me, we didn't want to do this, but we had no choice. If things had gone differently at Town Meeting we wouldn't be here tonight," explained Edie Previdi to the Board of Selectmen and an animated Rotondi.
"We have done everything we were supposed to do, or at least everything we were told we were supposed to do. We had a lot of people work real hard to help us with the petition," she added.
While Rotondi claimed that he had no problem with the people calling a Special Town Meeting, the Moderator offered what he termed his professional opinion and requested that the Board of Selectmen take up the issue at October's Town Meeting so that the Town didn't have to assume the costs of a summer session.
"I'm not at issue with people having concerns. There was a misunderstanding amongst many elected officials. To personalize it to me is inappropriate. It's even more inappropriate to cost the Town money when this could be brought up in October," said Rotondi after the Special Town Meeting was set by the board for July 28 at 7:30 pm.
"I just don't understand why there has to be a meeting in the middle of the summer," Rotondi added.
Addressing Rotondi's question as to why the issue couldn't be addressed in October, Stoneham resident Jean Craigie simply told the Moderator that the townspeople needed go forward to correct a previous error.
"The point of this is to correct a wrong, Michael," said Craigie with the tone of a disappointed mother.
Marking one of the many times the auditorium would resonate with the jumbled shouts of people fighting to be heard, Rotondi jolted out of his chair as soon as Craigie made the comment shouting, "Objection! Objection!"
While that interaction between the Moderator and Craigie represented one of the worst outbursts, an unexpected sparring match developed between Selectmen Charlie Smith and Cosmo Ciccarello almost from the outset of the meeting.
Congratulating Previdi and Ghannam on their steadfast dedication and conviction, Selectman Charlie Smith started to ask the two a question about the signatures.
"I'm glad you went out and got these signatures because that's the way I felt it needed to be done...My question is..." began Smith.
"No they didn't," interrupted Ciccarello, referring to the two residents' need to collect the signatures.
"Excuse me? I have the floor. I have the floor!...Forget it, I withdraw my question," said Smith, looking away from Ciccarello with an angry scowl.
After Ciccarello also requested to withdraw his interruption from the record, Smith muttered, "For 18 years you've been doing that...you buzzard."
Nearly five minutes after that dispute, the two Selectmen again went at it for one more round after Smith objected to Ciccarello setting the date for the meeting.
"Madam Chairman, my I ask a question? Why does he set the date and not you?" asked Smith.
"Anything you want. Do you want to set the date?" shot back Ciccarello.
"Nope. Anything you want. That's the way you've been doing it for 18 years," responded Smith, again fixing his red-hot expression away from Ciccarello.
Asked what the dispute was all about after the meeting, Smith accused Ciccarello of trying to skirt the Special Town Meeting process by not requiring the petitioners to collect the necessary signatures from the onset.
"They got the 200 signatures. That's why I voted for it...they were legal. This was all driven by him (Ciccarello). He had it arranged that he was going to get the three votes, so he told her (Ghannam) that she didn't need the signatures," speculated Smith, referring to the Board of Selectmen meeting two weeks ago when it was first agreed upon to hold a Special Town Meeting.
"In my opinion, there's a conflict between some members of the Board of Selectmen and the Moderator. I won't mention names," added Smith, who voted to cancel the Special Town Meeting last week along with Selectman Bob Sweeney.
According to Ciccarello, he first went along to accept the call to hold a Special Town Meeting because of a long standing Board of Selectman policy that requires the board to accept all articles submitted by a Town department.
"I think what we did last week was wrong. We had accepted the article because it was our article and it should have been accepted. Charlie is wrong. He just doesn't understand. We had a policy and that's why I voted to accept the other article," said Ciccarello.
Asked how she felt about the outcome of last night's meeting after the Selectmen endorsed the bid to hold a Special Town Meeting, a vindicated Ghannam said the Town had little choice but to accept the signatures, which were certified by Town Clerk John Hanright.
"This is a town not a city. We have the right to obtain signatures. We could do that ten times a year if we wanted to. It's our right. It's not the cost of it, it's the integrity of the Town Meeting process that's at issue here," explained Ghannam.
Giving his opinion on the outcome of the meeting, Rotondi expressed his belief that the issue could have been addressed through a less costly medium.
"There were many missteps admittedly made by many people in this process. For it to continue to be a personal issue is just mind-boggling. It should be about the process, not me...There could be a protected approach to looking at how motions come through the system and deal with it on a more proactive level," said Rotondi.
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