Adam HurtubiseCity ClerkMedford City Hall, Room 10385 George P. Hassett Drive
Medford, MA 02155
(781) 393-2425
To Clerk Hurtubise:
The Zoom was not functioning properly interfering in free speech rights at the Medford City Council on December 22, 2020.
For
a city of 60,000 people - something the Alliance for Community Media is
probably not aware of - with approximately one million dollars in
funding per year (I'm awaiting
a new public records request response) - the citizens are again denied free speech rights.
City
councilors joked about it and praised the individual responsible for
the failed audio on Zoom, Patrick Gordon. There was also some remark
clearly aimed at me about
"sabotage."
No need to sabotage an incompetent like Patrick Gordon being praised by
a deficient group of seven city councilors.
On Mon, Dec 14 at 9:00 AM you wrote me about participation at the city council.
I
especially wanted to alert the community about the pay-to-play phony
"award" from a non-profit, the Alliance for Community Media, which sells
these awards
for an application fee.
Due
to harassment by councilors (filed with Neil Osborne a few years back;
Osborne did nothing, he's another phony,) the last thing I wanted to do
was subject myself
to intentional audio disruption to deny me my free speech rights, just
as Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn is shamefully doing when she personally
writes me to
"get a sponsor."
1)I
demand that a city receiving approximately one million dollars find an
efficient platform, one that performs better than Zoom
2)With
all that money - sixty percent or so in the general fund,
twenty-percent spent on teacher salaries, if city hall is still engaging
in that wrongful conduct - one would think
that having a qualified station manager who can deliver internet,
classes and Twitter outreach - would be a priority for the mayor's
claims of "unity," "community," "integrity," - none of which has been
witnessed by those in the community paying Breanna Lungo-Koehn her
handsome salary.
The
mayor's failure to hire someone other than Stephanie Muccini-Burke's
leftovers - a poor choice at that - and to have reliable internet for a
council meeting in a pandemic is a slap in the face to the cable subscribers forking over huge fees that are invisible to most of the public
3)A
city of sixty thousand or so with a station in the "under $300,000.00"
category is disingenuous. There's not a non-profit running on 200k
anymore, as MCC TV3 was; this is a government control channel with a
budget of about a million dollars. Sure, the issuing authority - a
lawyer at that - can falsely claim the budget is 200k, but that's
alleged fraud.
And
this veteran of access TV submits that Patrick Gordon allegedly
committed fraud to get the award. He didn't submit any paperwork to
prove that the station is an independent non-profit,
which it isn't. It is city-owned access and the Alliance for Community
Media is aware, thanks to my efforts, about it being a GOVERNMENT
channel and High School Channel with the public, quite literally, left
out in the cold.
The
"under 300,000.00 $" award is a category that generally doesn't get
much attention. That's why the defunct Medford Community Cablevision,
Inc. stuffed the
ballots with allegedly hundreds of dollars in application fees. That
wasn't public access, it was an abuse of access fees. However, they
were telling the truth, at least in
that
case, as they got only 200k.
Mr. Gordon, using the high school studio
and his seventy thousand dollar or so paycheck, might be "allocated"
200k for certain things, but the "public"
takes a back seat to the educational and governmental aspects of access
television. It's a scam with policies and procedures designed to keep
the public out.
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