Posts Tagged ‘Board of Selectmen’

One thing that there’s no shortage of on social media is outrage. Democrats are outraged about Trump. Republicans are outraged about Hillary (and Trump). And apparently everybody’s outraged about underground power lines. Whether on social media or real life, sometimes it seems that there isn’t enough outrage where it’s truly warranted. That’s why it was […]


By about 11 p.m. Monday night, we should have a pretty good idea what Wakefield’s future will look like. Will the town retain a semblance of the working-class normalcy that has been its hallmark for generations? Or will it veer off in the direction of more genteel communities fond of banning everyday useful items like […]


Name shaming

21Sep17

Wakefield’s inexorable slide from a proud, blue collar, working class town to the precious PC world inhabited by communities like Cambridge, Concord and Lexington accelerated just a bit this month when the Board of Selectmen decided that it would, after all, like to change its name to one that does not have the word “men” […]


No win zone

01Sep17

Sometimes, the people in charge of things just can’t win, especially in the age of social media, where everybody’s a pundit. Recently, town officials announced several more initiatives to try to revitalize the downtown. Of course, it’s never enough. Or is it too much? Either way, the town is sure to get slammed for doing […]


Right on the heels of the plastic bags crisis, the latest issue to rock Wakefield is what name we should use for the town’s executive body. For the past 370 years, “Board of Selectmen” has done quite nicely, but no more. The position contains the word “man” (and in the plural, “men”). In 2017, this […]


Zoned out

20May17

I know some people don’t like me to write about marijuana, but the subject has been in the local news a lot lately and it’s kind of my job. So this constitutes a trigger warning for those delicate flowers of the Cannabis Community whose heads tend to explode when I write about pot. (Rest assured […]


High priorities

02Dec16

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Wakefield voters got fooled once into voting for “medical” marijuana, falling for the scam along with the rest of the state in 2012. Before you get your safety pins out, let me remind you that medical marijuana was sold under the guise of […]


To paraphrase the late, great Dan Hicks, “How can we miss them when they won’t go away?” Just when you thought it was safe to go to the Post Office on Saturday morning, they’re back like a bad penny – or three or four of them. The Wakefield Civic League, those guardians of our local […]


Now that July 19 is behind us, can we finally admit that all the hand-wringing over the Special Election had nothing to do with it costing the town $10,000 and everything to do with politics and the person who filed for the Special Election? After Phyllis Hull collected the 200 signatures needed to force the […]


As of this writing, we have eight people (and counting) running for Selectman in the July 19 Special Election to fill the nine months left on former selectman Betsy Sheeran’s term. This sudden surge of interest in public service is truly a wonderful thing to behold. My only question is, where were some of these […]