Dear Editor:
It was with a great deal of dismay and sadness that I recently made the difficult decision to step down from the Chelsea Public Safety Task Force, due to a number of grave concerns about the process, or lack of, that we have been following.
This group, appointed by City Council, first met at the end of February during the first week out of the roughly 14 weeks that the group will exist. The group is expected to bring forth recommendations on public safety to the City Council at the conclusion of this time.
The scope of the goals and purpose laid out for the task force is enormous and actually represents years worth of research and implementation. Since we are nearly 2 years on from the events that fractured the public’s trust in our police department and city representatives, I know that it’s difficult for the community to hear that we have a lot of work ahead of us to reach whatever goals we deem valuable – not to mention a lot of work to determine what those goals should be.
As much as we would like to believe that this is a simple and quick process, it is not.
Because of the enormous scope and the miniscule timeline, my desire, and expectation, was that this group would use its generous budget and access to several experts and facilitators to help guide the process, help us use our time well, and enable us to produce the most solidly researched recommendations possible.
It was very much to my dismay to discover that once the co-chairs were elected, we were told that a facilitator was unnecessary, that an expert was unnecessary and that we were then given an assignment to do that was outside of the scope of our already enormous goals and purpose.
There was no discussion and no vote on these issues. The group was no longer participating and making decisions as a whole.
I do have to note here that I did put a lot of effort into campaigning for expert guidance and was very grudgingly offered to research it on the side, with no other member volunteering to assist during the meeting.
This left me without any hope that this work would be fruitful. Furthering my concern is that our goals and purpose were then rewritten, not by council, with the omission of several goals, again without discussion or a vote or any expert input.
Public safety is a very serious, complicated topic that requires expert engagement. And I will take a moment here to clarify that this is in no way a commentary on the incredibly intelligent, dedicated and hard working volunteers making up the task force.
However, not a single one of us has any expertise on even one of the varied goals listed, let alone all of them.
We had the benefit of two incredible presentations at our very first meeting. One of them was from members of Saline’s strategic planning team. They engaged an expert from day one and built what they are now doing, with full team and community participation, for over a year.
This task force is now 5 weeks into its roughly 14 week existence – or 1/3 of the way through. It is vital that some kind of expert guidance is utilized to make this team’s work fruitful and to robustly back up the work that can be shown to bolster any recommendation that is brought forth.
Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. And it’s prudent to point out here how poorly it went for our community, and the delays and vital waste of time that followed, the last time our representatives refused to engage the proper professional facilitation needed.
If this process and its end result are important to you, I would highly recommend reaching out to the task force and city council to express this. Seeking expert guidance can in no way be detrimental to us. It’s important for the community to speak up and ensure there is a proper process in place for the future of our public safety concerns, even when we feel there are like-minded representatives at the table.
Our community cannot be too proud to access the proper resources for the benefit of our future.
Sincerely,
Susanne Vanden Bosch
Chelsea
