LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Response ironically sad

For all you citizens who were not in attendance at the meeting Thursday night, Oct. 25, in the Community Room, you missed the performance of a lifetime! A chance to see some of your city government in action, as the senior employee of the city had most of the City Hall employees and an elected official ready to back her up when she called on them. Two people from City Hall were absent, one of them being the mayor. He missed the spectacle made by some of his employees.

I now totally understand why this town has not had a regime change in so many years. Anyone who has a different opinion is met with total opposition consisting of being called a liar, being mocked, ridiculed, insulted and humiliated in public. The attempts at intimidation are downright disgusting.

A mayoral candidate was trying to present a PowerPoint presentation-using material from the City Municipal Code Book describing the duties of elected officials as well as information obtained from City Hall under FOI Act. All public information, available to anyone who asks.

The speaker was continually interrupted by the “Lady of the night” (title given on Facebook), and was told she didn’t know what she was talking about. The speaker was openly mocked and ridiculed as every attempt was made to humiliate her by eight different people in the group, six were in the lady’s group and two who don’t even live in the city but were the proverbial “agitators.” They all worked hard to make the speaker look bad and in so doing, they made themselves look like monsters.

The real travesty in all of this is that they made this community look horrible to the outside world, and make no mistake, there were outside people there.

There were newcomers to the city, there were old timers and there were visitors from out of town. A visiting senatorial candidate and his wife were present. Afterwards, these people expressed everything from anger to disgust at the performance. The senatorial candidate said he was appalled at the hatred coming from the back of the room. Sadly, I’m sure these people will talk to others and our community will have the reputation of being a very unfriendly place to live.

An event designed to be informative and allow citizens to ask questions about their city government and to encourage a new perspective, in other words a friendly question and answer session, degraded to a unified assault on the guest speaker.

Later that night Facebook was lively as the agitators crowed and bragged about what a great job they had done and how “the lady” had “ruled the night.” It was so ironic it might have been funny if it was not so incredibly sad for Pea Ridge.