Eli Coughlin-Galbraith

Brattleboro Selectboard: Reconsider making Representative Town Meeting in-person only

On Jan. 3, the Selectboard voted to hold Annual Representative Town Meeting as a strictly in-person event for the first time since 2019. The vote took place during the first board meeting of the year, and those of us with family obligations during the holiday could not attend.

The Selectboard should reconsider this decision for two reasons.

First of all, in the minutes of the meeting, I see that Selectboard members asked for the opinion of RTM members. However, no one actually seems to have checked the minutes of last year’s meeting.

At the end of that long night last March, as recorded on page 12 of those minutes, RTM passed the following motion:...

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Parking garage story: weird framing, missing voices

First: Kevin O'Connor says the Selectboard has yet to approve any cameras, but board member Tim Wessel posted on Facebook that they approved replacing the parking garage's outdated camera system. Did Kevin not check the minutes before submitting his article? Or did Tim make a rare mistake in his...

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Rescue coverage: an op-ed disguised as journalism

Kevin O'Connor has been writing on Rescue Inc. all year, and every time he positions Rescue as the poor beleaguered service providers, so virtuous and innocent, assassinated by a rogue Town Manager from outside Vermont. Horrors! His front-page article is yet another op-ed disguised as journalism. The Selectboard was...

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‘We will still be here, through what’s coming’

Around the time I transitioned, I started a business. It sells to transgender customers, mostly - people like me. We've shipped to every state in this country, now, and we send more to small towns than big cities by far. People send us letters and emails, saying: Hey, I didn't think anyone cared about what I needed, but this is what I needed. Or: I'm all alone out here in my small town, but I'm trying to get up the...

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Too special for the rules

The Write Action group sure seems to produce some very entitled writers with scant regard for public safety. Between Helen Neswald's “I got an unfair speeding ticket for going 19 over” [“Herd behavior on the highway,” Essay, Sept. 14] and Charlene Wakefield's “I was unjustly kicked out of Strolling of the Heifers for trespassing across a well-marked no-go zone” [“A shortcut leads to a writer's banishment,” Essay, July 6], I'd love to hear how they'll justify their unsafe actions when...

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