In Which We Do the Math in Ward 4: Part II – The Force Awakens

Haven’t heard from you re my email from Saturday.

I’m hoping you’ll let me know if I’m mistaken in my understanding of things or if there’s anything important you’d like to add that you feel I may be missing.

Thanks in advance,

Stephen

Tuesday.

Still no answer.

Finally, after three days and three unanswered emails, I concluded that she did not intend to respond.

At that point I forwarded my original email on to the Clam together with a few pargraphs of background on how it had come to be written and on my unsuccessful efforts to get her to correct anything I had gotten wrong or to let me know of anything else you thought was relevant.

The Clam Posts and Lo and Behold . . .

At 5 a.m. on Wednesday morning The Clam published my letter (and to my surprise, the few paragraphs of background I had hastily written) as part of this blog post In Which We Do Some Math in Ward 4.

Coincidentally — or I suppose possibly not coincidentally — at 7:49 that morning Ms. Goodick emailed me with this:

Sorry Stephen for it [sic] responding to you earlier.   

I will get back to you shortly.  

I’m traveling at this moment.  I do apologize that with several email accounts to check on, I missed yours.  

Kathryn 

Odd, I thought that she’d be traveling out of town at the height of campaign season, and odder still that, while travelling at such a critical time she would not check, or have someone else check, the email coming in to the address she had listed on her campaign literature.

Regardless, I immediately wrote to the folks at The Clam and told them she was preparing a response, and that if as a result we learned that anything in my piece was inaccurate we would have to correct it promptly.

And next I wrote her back:

Hi Kathryn,

Glad to see you’re on this now.  I’m looking forward to your response.

In the mean time, I should tell you that after waiting three days and sending you two emails all without a response, I concluded that you were yet another politician who wasn’t going to respond.  So yesterday afternoon I passed my letters, along with some background of how they came about to the folks at the excellent local blog, The Gloucester Clam.  You might know them from the top notch work they did covering the Market Basket situation a year or so ago.  Often it was their coverage that was picked up and repeated by the local and national news outlets covering the story.

They published my letters this morning.

I have already written to them to tell them that I have now heard from you and that they need to give you an opportunity to respond in some way at the Clam as well as to me, now that my concerns are more public.

Here’s a link to the post that went up this morning

In Which We Do Some Math in Ward 4

If I have gotten any relevant facts wrong I will work with you to make absolutely certain that the Clam corrects them prominently and immediately.

Stephen

She responded an hour or so later:

Stephen

Again [sic] I am not a politician and am very sorry you felt the need to do so [sic] on a social media website.  I was alerted to this fact this morning by others who read it.  

Since items that people have written on these sites and particularly about me directly have been a [sic] character assassination I do not read these any longer. 

Again I apologize for not responding sooner.  I am at work this morning but will get back to you when I take my lunch break.  

Thank you for understanding 

Kathryn

Lunch time came and went.

I got nothing from her.

Dinner time came and went.

Still nothing.

A Substantive Response

I finally got ready to go to bed at about 11:45 and checked by email one last time to discover that at 11:15 Ms. Goodick had emailed me a 1500+ word response along with two xls file attachments.

Now Ms. Goodick hasn’t yet asked The Clam to print her full email to me, although I believe it is willing to do so (omitting some potentially libelous material).

[Editor’s Note: The Clam has this morning offered Kathryn Goodick an opportunity to post the portions of this her email that are relevant to the issues raised in our original piece. -Ed.]

Suffice to say for now however that the gist of her email as it related to The Clam piece were her claims that:

1. Contrary to what I have written, she never claimed when she spoke at the coffee on Friday night that her taxes had gone up 17% in one year. What she said was only that they had gone up 17% over the past few years.

2. Her children could not, in fact, afford to live in her house even if she gave it to them because, although as she put it: “as you accurately stated my taxes are $1,600 per quarter . . . [nonetheless] . . . they [still] couldn’t afford it” because they would also have other bills to pay such as food, utilities and student loans.

3. Her claim that the city budget isn’t available to the public was correct because the full proposed budget isn’t made available to the public until the day it is voted on, at which point it is too late for any meaningful review.

After I read her email yesterday morning, I saw that she had also sent a second follow up email several hours later in which she offered to “help me with the math.”

“Me [one] more fact for you.  My quarterly property bill for 2014 in August 2014 was $1,460.80 compared to my tax bill due on February 2015 was $1,712.93.  Again this was due in part to the city’s decision to put the entire water debt shift on two quarters vs spread out over four quarters.  

Let me help you with the math:  it is a difference of $252.13…or 17%!!!”

Again [sic] as an attorney, you understand that [false and potentially libelous material redacted] is not looked upon very kindly.  So with that, I would ask you to take down your harsh and [false and potentially libelous material redacted] comments; and I will await your apology.

Silence [sic].

Kathryn Goodick