A wonderful, informed, and balanced report and commentary. Thank you Christiaan A. Hart Nibbig. Mine, I fear, will not be so kind.
I too was very sad today and I called Molly Henderson, who I have only met once in a grocery store 4 years ago. I had followed the convention center story in the regular newspapers before I knew there was any alternative media like NewsLanc. I agreed with Henderson and Shellenberger that questions needed to be asked since we were all asked to support the public/private enterprise. The deal was very complex and so I also agreed that the commissioners needed to get expert legal advice in order to understand it and be able to ask the right questions. This was their fiduciary duty to the people that elected them and also a duty to their own consciences. The did their duty and were damned for doing it.
These were our commissioners doing our work, and the belligerent, arrogant, self important, self righteous, response by the Partners through their spokespeople was the most high handed, anti-democratic tactic I have seen in my life. Not a single question was answered by corporations that were using every bit of public money available, or which could be made available, every tax benefit, every protection from private liability, every structural amenity that the private hotel could use from the publicly funded convention center and yet our representatives, the people we elected had no right to even ask a single question. How dare anyone, let alone an elected public official, question, that two private, for profit corporations would do anything not 100% in the public interest. We should have canonized the Partners as community saints for using our money and our authority, and our legislatures (state and local) and our guarantees, to build 170 million dollar project of questionable feasibility.
A public/private partnership can be a good thing and Molly Henderson is and was not opposed to such an enterprise. But this was handled in the worst fashion possible from the beginning, and Molly Henderson and Dick Shellenberger paid an enormous price. They did not deserve it as your former reporter and free lance writer says so well. I thought some vindication in the courts would be a healing of sorts so we could move on. Not to be.
Even this morning’s paper carries on this defamation of Molly Henderson ever more by the attorney for Lancaster Newspapers who outrageously commented “One of the important roles of the press is to expose the actions of our government servants and raise questions as to their conduct in office, which is exactly what Lancaster Newspapers did here,” Unbelievable!
It is also a damnable and demonic lie meant to feed into the anti politician mentality and add insult to injury. It is not enough to win, you have to spike the ball and shove it down the throats of the vanquished. It is what demagogues do. It was also stupid. That comment may well resolve this county to hold a Molly Henderson day every year on June 14th, Flag day, American justice day, fair play day, a freedom day from the tyranny of those aristocratic bullies who believe they are above the rules for ordinary men and women. Let’s us, who are many, use that day to tell them, who are few, that we don’t tolerate that here. This is America! Damn it!
