To the editor:

A recent Portsmouth Times article reported that one Portsmouth town councilor thinks Portsmouth has a PR problem. The actual problem is that Portsmouth has difficulty telling residents the truth. Here are four examples from the last year:

1) One year ago this month, residents got confirmation that a number of town employees had been added to, or unfrozen in, the closed town pension plan. This was after years of the town obfuscating and denying it.

2) Residents were told repeatedly that the town was not negotiating with SouthCoast Wind about bringing cables through Portsmouth, only to be presented with a completed Host Community Agreement. Not one word of that agreement was changed by the council before signing.

3) One council member repeated four times during the transfer station meeting that the town was “taking no action to close the transfer station.” Was that councilor intentionally trying to mislead residents or had he simply not done his homework? In the legally required responses to the original RFPʼs biddersʼ questions, question No. 33 reads: “Will the transfer station remain an option for resident use?” The townʼs response was simply: “No.”

4) During the roundabout decision, Portsmouth refused to provide to the public the finished engineering drawings, which the town possessed. Assuming those documents were being used in the councilʼs decision making, that is a violation of the Open Meeting Act. If they were not being used, how could the council possibly make an informed decision?

The councilor in the Portsmouth Times article needs to understand that the residents are fed up with not the getting the proper information about major town decisions, or worse, getting misleading information. The solution is not to spend $50K on a PR firm for the town, but to simply start giving residents the information they are entitled to, in a truthful and timely manner.

Tom Grieb

110 Thayer Drive

Portsmouth