Bob Desmarais, president of the School Lane Hills Association, should have known in advance of the Rail Yard meeting at F&M, that any meetings held on the F&M campus and hosted by F&M officials are controlled meetings, with no opportunity given for true public discussion or input.
Since 2003, when John Fry came to F&M as president, F&M has frequently sponsored meetings on a variety of issues that would impact on the surrounding neighborhoods. Even though these were billed as “public meetings”, they were actually F&M info-meetings held to publicize F&M’s plans and to fulfill City requirements for a “public meeting”.
These were public meetings only in the sense that they were meetings that happened to be open to the public. A “public forum” or a “public hearing”, they definitely were not.
