I saw Doug McGuire regularly at PTSA meetings back when I was on the School Board. He cares about his kids. I presume that this is the principal motivation behind this letter he sent to the Trib last week. I bear him no malice and take his letter as a good faith effort to impart an important point of view to the public. That said I will pick it apart paragraph by paragraph.
Harry Welty’s scorched-earth war continues with an upcoming and no doubt libelous book about Superintendent Keith Dixon. Hopefully attorneys will descend upon him like the plague of locusts he predicts will fall on Duluth when the long-range plan comes to fruition.
Since Ralph Doty begged JCI to sue me for libel a couple days before the 2007 school board election making it impossible for me as a candidate to rebut him folks have been praying that I would be brought to my knees in court. If Doug hasn’t noticed it my lone attorney was confronted by a plague of attorneys representing JCI and the District. The question I would ask Doug is this. Does he have any doubt that either of these entities have deep enough pockets to expose me as a liar in court if they wanted to?
Welty’s chief lieutenant is Gary Glass, who’s colluded with the Let Duluth Vote attorney to sue himself as a representative of the school district. Glass votes against every resolution, even against holding a meeting. He seems to stand against a lot of things, even himself.
I wish our critics would decide which of us, Glass or me is the puppet master. In the case of the District there is no doubt who wields this power. As for the “sue himself” meme. That’s just ill informed repetition of a joke. Gary believes, and I concur, that he has been denied information that is due him as an elected member of the Board. So is Doug suggesting that as long a majority of the School Board are criminals the minority must simply go along with their criminality with no power to challenge it in court? I think logically this is exactly what Doug and his allies are arguing.
Candidate Art Johnston’s “Plan B” presentation was contradicted by the professionals hired to help him develop the plan. He seems to think he knows more and is better qualified than the entire engineering and architectural community contracted to implement the long-range plan.
Not true. Any contradictions were the invention of the School Administration aided by an uncritical reporter for the local newspaper.
Candidate Marcia Stromgren apparently is too busy to engage in politics because she’s also a township soil and water representative. If she’s too busy to attend candidate screenings, is she too busy to be on the School Board? Her affiliation is with the Constitution party, which opposes public education.
This tripe like the invention of my call for confusing the public two years ago comes from a reporter who has developed a habit of hectoring critics of the School Board and has been quite successful in portraying critics of the Red Plan as being ridiculous. She is a member of the Constitution Party just as I was once a Republican. Doug makes the elementary mistake of thinking that party affiliation turns a member into an automaton. The only automatons in Duluth currently serve as the School Board’s majority. Even if Marcia is too conservative for my tastes she is more than counterbalanced by the liberal Maureen Booth. Both of them have a quality that puts them head and shoulders above their incumbent rivals. The are both willing to fight for the right of the voters.
Candidate Tom Kasper is a nice guy, but what does he stand for? His NIMBY position against Ordean as a high school contradicts that the building was there long before he lived in the neighborhood. He wants to move it miles out of town and spend $60 million more to build a school that would require busing 100 percent of the kids.
Doug’s analysis of “nice guy” Tom is that he’s more concerned for his property value than he is for school children – damn NIMBY. And Doug simply refuses to see that spending $60 million to turn Ordean into a high school would be unnecessary if only Central was kept as Duluth’s second high school.
Somehow Welty’s troops have captured the public’s attention, using his stated purpose of confusing the issue.
Somehow Doug’s allies repeat this mantra despite the fact that it is the School District that is withholding public data while the folks allied with me are doing our best to remedy this obstruction.
Fortunately, present School Board members are not sitcom actors from Hogan’s Heroes. They’ve shown courage to make tough decisions for the community. Nancy Nilsen, Mary Cameron, Laura Condon and Ann Wasson deserve thanks – and votes — for representing Duluthians who believe in our future.
Doug Maguire
Duluth
There is a fine line between courage and stubbornness. Had the School Board members ever shown any inclination to compromise with the Red Plan’s critics they could not be accused of stubbornness. As for courage, there is a fine line between this virtue and arrogance.
