MacCallum: Councilors campaigned on sound barriers but have made no progress
Councilors campaigned on sound barriers but have made no progress
Aug. 6 − To the Editor:
I always enjoy dueling with Gerald Duffy on the editorial pages of this paper. Especially because I always win. In this instance, he takes issue with my recent critique of the members of the current Portsmouth City Council, whom he and his pro-developer political activist group Progress Portsmouth helped elect, and he objects to my criticism of them for their mishandling of the McIntyre Building purchase. (Gerald Duffy, “Letter tried to be critical but instead highlighted Progress Portsmouth’s success,” Letters to the Editor, 7/19/23.)
He also brags that in my critique I have highlighted − unwittingly, he thinks − Progress Portsmouth’s success in the last City Council election. (Id.) Here’s my response to his latest missive:
Contrary to the suggestion made by Mr. Duffy in his letter to the editor, I have never denied that he and his organization did a very effective job of promoting their candidates for City Council and getting them elected. Indeed, Progress Portsmouth’s propaganda may very well have been the main reason that those candidates won their seats. (Hence the appropriate moniker, “the Progress Portsmouth 9”.) I have always freely admitted that on one level, Mr. Duffy and Progress Portsmouth are well justified in congratulating themselves for their success in getting their hand-picked, pro-development candidates elected.
But did they do it ethically? That, I’m afraid, is a much different question. And my answer is: Not so much. Consider the following:
During the last City Council election, Mr. Duffy circulated a fancy, professionally-produced campaign mailer in which he shamelessly claimed credit, on behalf of Progress Portsmouth’s endorsed candidates, for all of the hard work that Rick Becksted, Esther Kennedy, and the rest of the so-called “Becksted 5” had done to procure sound barriers for the I-95 corridor running between the Pannaway Manor and New Franklin School neighborhoods, prospectively bringing much-needed relief to the long-suffering residents of those neighborhoods. The mailer stated: “The time for sound barriers is now! The next council will work hard together to secure state funds for this important project. Choose 9 of 10: [listing Progress Portsmouth’s ten preferred candidates]”.
In reality, Progress Portsmouth’s candidates had had absolutely nothing to do with the effort to secure those barriers, other than to show up to “see and be seen” at on-site neighborhood meetings which then-City Councilors Esther Kennedy and Petra Huda had organized. Ms. Kennedy and then-Mayor Rick Becksted were the ones who had traveled to Concord and personally met with Governor Sununu to ask him to use his influence to procure the sound barriers and the funding for same. In addition to organizing the aforementioned on-site meetings, Ms. Kennedy and Ms. Huda were also the ones who recruited citizen speakers and made sure that a contingent of Portsmouth residents was dispatched to appear at out-of-town public hearings before the State’s executive councilors, in order to lobby them for funding.
Progress Portsmouth’s endorsees had had nothing to do with any of this. In essence, Mr. Duffy and Progress Portsmouth hijacked the issue which Mayor Becksted, Councilor Kennedy, and the others had spotlighted, propelled to the forefront, and made the first tangible progress thereon in decades, and Progress Portsmouth falsely claimed that issue as its own.
Which reminds me: Where are the sound barriers? By the time they left office, Mr. Becksted, Ms. Kennedy, and the others had secured preliminary approval and funding for the installation of sound barriers on the Pannaway Manor side of the I-95 corridor, and they were still working on approval for the New Franklin School side. The Progress Portsmouth 9 have now been in office for more than a year and a half, and thus far no one has so much as turned a shovel of dirt by way of actually beginning the process of installing those barriers.
In little more than six months, Mayor Becksted et al. had marched the ball down the field and moved it all the way down to the 1-yard line. Why is it that in a year and a half, the Progress Portsmouth 9 have not been able to advance the ball that final yard or carry it over the goal line?
Duncan J. MacCallum
Portsmouth
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: MacCallum: Councilors promised but made no progress on sound barriers
