Duxbury, MA, USA's 24/7 Alternative News and Commentary
By William F. Zachmann, for the Duxbury Clipper
OK, I confess! There was a wee trick hidden in my last column (“The Duxbury Power Structure”, Wednesday, July 27, 2011)! Formally, we do not actually have a new Town Government Study Committee. We would have had one, had then and still Board of Selectmen Chairman Shawn Dahlen had his way. He wanted to create one with an article in the Warrant of the 2011 Annual Town Meeting. [Read more...]
By William F. Zachmann, for the Duxbury Clipper
Twenty years ago, in 1991, the Duxbury Political Machine was in a bit of a quandary. Several years earlier it had successfully engineered the passage by the Massachusetts legislature and acceptance by the Town of Chapter 353 of the Acts of 1987: “An Act providing for a Town Manager in the Town of Duxbury”. The Machine had pushed hard for the change and, in 1988, tapped Tom Groux as Duxbury’s first Town Manager. [Read more...]
By William F. Zachmann, for the Duxbury Clipper
“The Favor Bank” is the title a chapter in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 best seller “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. Sherman McCoy is a millionaire preppy WASP bond trader in New York City whose privileged “Master of the Universe” status is threatened by a hit-and-run accident in the South Bronx. As circumstances close in on him, McCoy hires Tommy Killian, a street-wise criminal lawyer intimately familiar with the system. [Read more...]
Responses, by way of letters to the editor, to my latest columns in the Duxbury Clipper are proving to be, to me at least, as rewarding as they are interesting. They offer valuable feedback confirming that what I have been writing for the Clipper is having its intended effect(s). I will be addressing several of them in a series of blog posts here over the next week or two.
Published in the Duxbury Clipper on Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Twenty years ago, in 1991, the Duxbury Political Machine was in a bit of a quandary. Several years earlier it had successfully engineered the passage by the Massachusetts legislature and acceptance by the Town of Chapter 353 of the Acts of 1987: “An Act providing for a Town Manager in the Town of Duxbury”. The Machine had pushed hard for the change and, in 1988, tapped Tom Groux as Duxbury’s first Town Manager.
The promise that persuaded voters to accept a Town Manager form of government was that it would bring professional management, financial responsibility, and greater efficiency. But unfortunately, three years later, Duxbury was in a bigger mess financially than it had been before a Town Manager was hired. [Read more...]
Published in the Duxbury Clipper on Wednesday, June 15, 2011
The ability of free citizens to govern themselves wisely has been debated for thousands of years. In Athens, the cradle of democracy, over 2500 years ago, the philosopher Plato advocated rule by an educated elite. His student, Aristotle, outright favored rule by an aristocratic elite. In the early days of the United States of America, Alexander Hamilton represented a similar view, opposing Thomas Jefferson’s push for a more open democracy. He would have approved of Duxbury’s Political Machine.
What? Duxbury’s Political Machine? What the heck is that? Who ever heard of such a thing? What is this, some sort of local weird conspiracy theory? [Read more...]
Published in the Duxbury Clipper on Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Meetings of the Duxbury Board of Selectmen or School Committee may not be the highest rated reality shows these days, but having them on TV at least gives citizens and taxpayers a chance to see what their elected officials are doing. Or, at least, it did until the Cable TV Advisory Committee, the Board of Selectmen, and the Town Managers office miserably fumbled the ball with Verizon FIOS and the renewal of the Comcast contract. [Read more...]
Published in the Duxbury Clipper on Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Duxbury is now just one more (2/3) vote of Town Meeting and one more Proposition 2½ override (by simple majority) in a general election away from a brand new middle and high school. No doubt it will pass. No doubt it will bring a huge increase in our real estate taxes. But what will it really do for the quality of education in Duxbury’s schools?
[Read more...]
Welcome to the new Duxbury Times site! The original concept for this site was to create a broad spectrum on-line local newspaper, but after a year experimenting with that notion, we decided it would work best as a local blog site, covering and commenting on what’s what in Duxbury, Massachusetts, USA. [Read more...]
