Friday, August 22, 2008

What took them so long?

The Newbury Beach Committee has resigned. All of the members have, or are about to, be history.

Read about it here, in the Daily News.

All six members of a Newbury committee charged with developing beach management plans have resigned.

Newbury Beach Advisory Committee Chairman Paul Ivaska, Linda Wood, Lois Smith, Martin Saradjian, Stanley Liffman and Gay Schoene, either turned in letters of resignation Tuesday night or plan to do so soon, according to committee members interviewed this week.

Charged with developing beach management plans - well, as I said in this post on June 18:

Isn't that what the Newbury Beach Committee was doing before all this started? With little or no funding? How many times do I have to say this? And when is the DN going to point this out? Never - that's my guess.

Seriously, these people gave their time (and lots of it) to try to save this beach (I still can't find the photos I took last year of them out installing snow fence in the cold, on a Saturday morning). And what did they get in return? Nary a mention in the mainstream media, and I imagine no calls to consult about the erosion situation on the beach.

No, instead they were circumvented, the Plum Island Foundation was created, and here now this group of dedicated people is gone. The only one of them I really talked to in depth was Paul Ivanska, but he sure knows that beach.

I only wonder what took them so long.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or perhaps the Plum Island Foundation was born of the same lack of support from the town ??

Gillian Swart said...

Lack of response? There was more media hype about this than almost anything else around here, excluding the alleged Gloucester teen pregnancy pact thing. All of it generated, as I understand it, out of Town Hall.

All the hype may have freed up some money, but now they're fighting with Salisbury.

bah humbug

Anonymous said...

You really are a closet class warrior aren't you.....Or is it simply the personalities of those who head the various groups ?

So let me get this straight.....PIBC disbanded because it wasn't getting enough support from the town but The PIF is getting too much support ???

The fact is that PITA was the driving force behind the action that has resulted related to the erosion and that's now where PIBC is transferring its efforts. In fact there was already some ongoing duplication of efforts between the various groups.

Gillian Swart said...

No, I meant the issue got a lot of support. The hype led to the lobbyist and to the PIF. Along the way, the beach committee got dissed. Any time I was doing a story about the beach committee (I wrote 2), PITA head dude Ron Barrett was right there in the mix. I thought it was a good confluence of resources, which is why I was writing about it.

I don't see that now - or didn't, at any rate.

Newburyport does this, too (forms a citizen commission or committee and then subverts whatever its mission is).

I guess I am a class warrior. I really don't have anything personal against anyone in Newbury. It just made a good story.

Anonymous said...

The problem with the PIBC (from my perspective) was that it was Newbury-only, which didn't do me any good.

As for everything else - well we've got a few large dogs in a rather small dog park....