COVID may be over, but we still face an even more dangerous epidemic: complacency.

We saw it a few weeks ago, when a whopping 18 percent of Wakefield’s eligible voters supported building a new $274 million high school. It passed anyway because 75 percent of the town’s registered voters either didn’t know or didn’t care enough cast a ballot.

It turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg of indifference. The belated opposition to the Northeast Metro Tech building project presents an even more disturbing example.

Environmental activists came out of the woodwork at the eleventh hour to try to derail the project after voters in the district’s 12 communities had approved the plans. These woodland watchdogs had somehow missed the fact that the new school was going to be built in a nearby forested area owned by the school.

So very deeply did they care about “The Northeast Metro Tech Forest” that they were AWOL for the last four years as all the decisions were being made at public meetings. Now they come forward, after the district has voted, and insinuate that NEMT officials were somehow hiding the new school’s location from the public.

In their latest desperate ploy to try and kill the project, the activists have filed an Open Meeting Law Complaint with the Massachusetts Attorney General dated March 20, 2023, claiming, among other things, that the NEMT Building Committee held meetings as far back as 2018 that were not properly posted. These champions of transparency were so outraged that they waited over four years to file their complaint. The most recent alleged violation occurred over seven months ago.

The AG requires Open Meeting Law complaints to be filed within 30 days of the violation, so this is just the latest Hail Mary tactic that will go nowhere. The Attorney General isn’t going to halt a public school building project over meeting posting errors.

Funny thing is, I knew more than two years ago where the school was going to be built. I don’t have access to any inside knowledge. I rely on public information, just like everyone else. If I knew the planned location of the new Voke school a year before the Special Election, then that information was, by definition, knowable.

The activists have even tried to blame me for not telling them about it! They claim that if the reporter they hate had only written about it in the newspaper they refuse to read, they would have known about it much earlier.

But in fact, I did write about it. To cite just one example, on March 3, 2021 I wrote a front-page Wakefield Daily Item lead story headlined, “CONSULTANT TO ASSIST CONCOM WITH VOKE SITE REVIEW.” For those who don’t get the paper, the article was also posted online.

In the story, I noted that at the Conservation Commission meeting, commissioners were shown a topographical map of the proposed site, showing the locations of “bordering vegetated wetlands, isolated wetland areas, intermittent streams and other related features” on the map.

I even got more specific in describing where they planned to put the new school: “The area under consideration includes the present site of the school and extends out to Farm Street to the east of June Circle.”

In addition, my Item article noted, “Several residents of June Circle asked about the impact on their neighborhood of building the school and a new access road behind their homes.” So, those residents knew about the forest location where the school was going to be built as early as March of 2021. The information was out there.

I would have more sympathy for their cause if the ‘Save the Forest’ people would accept just a little responsibility for their own inattention. But why take responsibility when you can blame others for your ignorance?

The opponents laughably claim that they’re not trying to derail the project. They just want the school to be built on one of the existing athletic fields. But a major change to the plan, such as relocating the building, would effectively void the Project Funding Agreement with MSBA, which is based on the specific plan that the voters in the district approved. Say goodbye to $141 million in state funding.

The activists know that, but they don’t care. To paraphrase a Facebook comment from one of the ‘Save the Forest’ people, “Who cares if the school project goes away? If we lose the forest, it’s gone forever!”

Virtually every home and building in existence anywhere today sits on land that was at one time forest or woods. But suddenly, in 2023, we’ve decided to draw a line in Wakefield, Massachusetts and say, “No more!”

The opponents of the NEMT project rail at any assertion that they’re just “a few activists.” They point to some online petition signed by 6,000 people. “That’s more people than voted for the new Wakefield High School!” they sniff, stamping their little feet.

They fail to mention that the 6,000 people came from 12 communities in the NEMT district, not just Wakefield. Nobody takes online petitions seriously anyway. People sitting in front of their computer will “sign” a petition asserting that the sky is green and then go back to browsing TikTok videos.

Back in 2012, 27 percent of Wakefield voters supported building the new Galvin Middle School. A full one-third of the town’s voters showed up at the polls. Compare that to last month, when just 18 percent of the voters favored a new high school and barely 25 percent cast ballots.

And now, this belated and dilatory reaction to the Voke building project.

It’s not a good sign when civic engagement is trending backwards. If people don’t wake up soon, they could find themselves living in a world they hardly recognize.
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[This column originally appeared in the April 6, 2023 Wakefield Daily Item.]