As Candidates Vie for Plymouth County Commissioner Seats, Plymouth's Vecchi Calls for Transparency, Democratic Accountability, and Open Government
Valanzola and Hanley, who voted for Boston South lease while refusing to hear public comment, up for reelection
[7:02 pm update: Readers, I apologize for not being explicit — I support Scott Vecchi for Plymouth County Commissioner in tomorrow’s election, though I wish all the candidates well. This publication has a point of view, and it aligns in this election with Mr. Vecchi’s. — Ben Cronin]
(PLYMOUTH) — Voters in the twenty-six towns and one city of Plymouth County will go to the polls in the primary elections tomorrow, Tuesday, September 3rd, choosing among candidates in the Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian Parties.
There are five candidates running for seats on the Plymouth County Commission: on the Democratic side, they are Greg Hanley, of Abington, who is an incumbent County Commissioner; Vice Chair of the Hanover Select Board Rhonda Nyman; and Plymouth Redevelopment Authority Commissioner Scott Vecchi. Esq. [Note: I worked at Quincy College at the same time as Scott Vecchi, and Greg Hanley was and is a member of the Board of Governors Quincy College. I also support Mr. Vecchi in this race].
On the Republican side, incumbent County Commissioner Jared Valanzola — who has historically lived in Rockland but has recently claimed a Plymouth address — faces Anthony O’Brien, of Brockton, who served as a County Commissioner from 2009 to 2013, according to his website.
There are no Libertarian Party candidates for County Commissioner.
In both the Republican and Democratic primaries, voters must choose not more than two candidates.
It is notable that both Commissioner Valanzola and Commissioner Hanley are up for reelection. One of the several crises that impelled me to start writing and publishing this newsletter was the attempt, in the spring of 2022, by the O’Connell clan of Quincy casino developers to turn the County Wood Lot — which is the property of all 530,000 plus citizens of Plymouth County — off of Camelot Drive in Plymouth into a horse racing track/casino complex for their private gain.
As readers may recall, this effort failed abysmally, suffering an 88% to 12% defeat in the non-binding ballot question that Plymouth citizens voted on in the May 2022 Town Elections.
What is notable, however, for the purposes of this article, is the absolute travesty of a public meeting of the County Commissioners on March 31st, 2022, at which Commissioners Wright, Valanzola, and Hanley — while adamantly refusing to hear public comment at the meeting from assembled members of the public, including Plymouth Town Meeting members and experienced attorneys with germane factual and legal points to raise — voted to proceed with the process of signing a lease with Boston South Real Estate and Development Group, the cutout corporation which the O’Connells have been using in their longstanding attempt to build a casino in the region (the O’Connells, under the name Notos Group, tried and failed in 2021 to develop environmentally sensitive pine barrens in the Red Brook watershed in Wareham into a casino; they lost by 813 to 141 votes at Wareham Town Meeting).
The March 31st, 2022, County Commission meeting was a profound and shocking violation of all the norms and standards of procedural fairness which ought to govern public meetings in a democracy. Indeed, one of the consistent problems I have had in dealing with the sitting County Commissioners is the sense that the County is not and ought not to be accountable to the people; that the people exist to serve the County Commission, and not the other way around.
I wrote that meeting of the County Commissioners up for the very first article I published on Substack, here: https://plymouthcountyobserver.substack.com/p/casino-developer-seeks-horse-track. It was, and remains, an extremely troubling meeting, verging on outrageous, for anyone who cares about open and democratic government.
[UPDATE: For those who did not click through the link, it describes, in part, Commissioner Hanley’s post facto and begrudging agreement to meet with members of the public only after public comment had closed, in the basement of the County Commission building. It also details Mr. Hanley’s answers to reasonable questions from his constituents; interested readers can click through for more details.]
[UPDATE #2: Today, Tuesday morning, Sept. 3rd, at 10:31 a.m. on Primary Election Day and after the publication of this article, Commissioner Valanzola wrote back with answers to my questions.
On Aug. 28th, I asked him, via email, why he is running for reelection. He replied: “I’m running to continue to position the county as a regional services agency while saving taxpayers money. We will continue to collaborate with local and state leaders on issues of importance.”
I also asked him if he thought the County Commissioners meeting of March 31st, 2022 was procedurally fair:
“On March 31st, 2022, the Plymouth County Commission, consisting of Commissioners Hanley, Wright, and Valanzola, unanimously voted in favor of Mr. Valanzola’s motion ‘that the Request for Proposals for Lease of Realty Property-County-Owned Land for the Plymouth County Wood Lot-CONTRACT is hereby awarded to Boston South Real Estate and Development Group LLC (“BSREDG”) in principle for the Wood Lot Lease based on the primary tenets of the lease, in consideration of financial payment of Two Hundred Thousand Dollars and Zero Cents ($200,000.00) payable on July 1, 2022; One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars and Zero Cents ($150,000.00) payable on July 1, 2023; and One Hundred Thousand Dollars and Zero Cents ($100,000.00) payable on July 1, 2024.
This Vote further authorizes Legislative Counsel, Shannon Resnick, to finalize the remainder of the lease contract with the attorney for BSREDG.’ (Minutes, Plymouth County Commissioners Meeting, 3/31/2022)
This vote was taken without opportunity for public comment, despite numerous members of the public being present and quite clearly wishing to speak, and despite one Plymouth Town Meeting Member’s expressed desire to bring factually and legally relevant information to the attention of the Commissioners prior to the vote being taken.
In your view, was that vote procedurally fair?”
Commissioner Valanzola answered as follows: “[T]he vote was by the letter of the law. We had a public hearing in May of 2022, and many aspects of the public commentary have been brought to Boston South.”
With due respect to Commissioner Valanzola, that is not what I asked. We are all familiar with instances in which the letter of the law may be followed, but the results are profoundly unjust (indeed, this forms one of the earliest themes in Western literature — see, e.g., Antigone, by Sophocles). I asked whether that meeting was procedurally fair.
Commissioner Valanzola does not answer that question in his reply, because the answer is: it wasn’t. — Ben Cronin.]
I contacted all five candidates regarding the race. Only Scott Vecchi got back to me, and indeed, Mr. Vecchi gave full and insightful answers to my questions.
Commissioner Greg Hanley, to be fair, did answer factual questions I sent to him regarding his trip to Ireland on County business in 2023, but did not answer questions about the current campaign or about procedural fairness.
Mr. Vecchi told me that he is deeply concerned by the County Commissioners’ lack of transparency and democratic accountability. We discussed a number of issues — including the County Farm, owned by the County and leased by the Sheriff’s Department; and the aforementioned Wood Lot — and the ways in which the County failed to meet minimally acceptable standards of open government. County Commission meetings are almost never recorded or broadcast live, and their public posting appear, to this observer, sporadic.
On the County Farm issue, Mr. Vecchi noted that the County right now faces serious financial problems, including a budget deficit of approximately $900,000. For this reason, he found it troubling that the County Commissioners elected to extend the Sheriff Department’s lease without negotiating for a better price. Mr. Vecchi pointed to Section 14 of Chapter 34 of the General Laws, which says that the Commissioners must seek “fair market value” for any sale or conveyance of property relating to jails, and which prescribes a process of public notification which was not initially taken, and which, Mr. Vecchi says, occurred only after the lease was extended — arguably in contravention of the statute.
He let the County Commissioners know his views on this issue at an August 15th, 2024, meeting of the County Commission.
“I have some serious concerns that this Board took a vote to lease the farm to the sheriff for five years for $20,000 [per year] — which was actually the amount allocated by the arbitrator back when there was a lawsuit between the County and the Sheriff with the intent of renegotiating that at the end of five years — and so the fact that the Board took a vote without doing this public process, and now are trying to put the public process back into the formula of what’s already the fruit of a poisonous tree, I have some serious concerns about that process, and whether this meeting is actually even legal according to the process,” Mr. Vecchi said.
(Scott Vecchi explains his concerns around the extension of the lease on the County Farm to the Plymouth County Commission; credit — Plymouth County Commission.)
While the Sheriff (against whom Mr. Vecchi ran in 2016), he said, is the appropriate entity to manage the farm, the lack of procedural regularity in terms of extending that lease is troubling.
“What’s in place appears to be working. However, there appears to have been no attempt to determine fair market value for what that lease is. $20,000 in today’s housing market and all that other stuff — again, it’s an agricultural restriction, so that affects it — but, to me there appears to have been no attempt to determine what the fair market value of a lease of an agricultural plot of land would be, and that to me is a disservice to the voters. It’s a disservice to all twenty-seven communities that make up the County, and it’s a disservice to all the people that elected you to sit there,” he said.
“So, what I would like to see is an actual appraisal done of the farm, to find out what today’s current fair market value of a lease of that farm is, before we even try to do all this stuff, before we try to remediate the poison tree; and I don’t see that has taken place. And in my opinion, that is a disservice to all of the voters in the County. The last time I checked, there were about 250,000,” said Mr. Vecchi.
Mr. Vecchi was adamant that money must be found — and he avers that the estimated money required very likely does exist in Plymouth County budget — to broadcast and record County Commission meetings. In addition, the Commission must be transparent, democratically accountable, and available to listen to public concerns and comments, he said.
“You have to give people the opportunity to be heard,” Mr. Vecchi told The Plymouth County Observer.
The primary election is tomorrow, Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024.