The midnight and expensive oil is being burned at Shipman & Goodwin trying to extricate our BOE from public indictment and they seem to have their work cut out for them- again.

The recent postings at www.woodstockctcoalition.org regarding pending FOI requests are truly something to see. If you browse the most recent legal bills you will see that true to typical form, the counselors at Shipman are throwing up a smoke screen that could block out the Sun. Some of it is downright silly, but that is what they get paid for. You would think that Woodstock is Greenwich. I can hear the laughter from here.

As an observer to all of this, I have to ask, is saving the face of the duplicitous leadership of this board worth the education dollars being diverted to Shipman especially when they, like the citizen pursuing the FOIA requests, can get legal advice from the FOI Commission for free?  This begs an entirely different question. I have to assume they won’t like the free advice because it’s not what they want to hear- certainly a distinct possibility.  

My research has led me to a number of interesting facts including that the BOE has taken training from CABE on these very issues- were they not paying attention in class? CABE and the FOI Commission tell BOE’s all the time what the rules are and how to abide by them including the following interesting quote: “If you don’t want to provide the materials sought, then you probably shouldn’t have been doing what you were doing in the first place”. So what is it that they don’t understand about the law that they need to have continuous advice by the hour for a fairly simple set of statutes? See them here- http://www.state.ct.us/foi/2001FOIA/2001FOIAStatutoryIndex.htm

Any way you look at it, this is shaping up to be quite a train wreck and the individual pursuing these requests doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. I call it our right to know. I say good for him and ultimately good for our town.