In the Thursday, April 16 edition of The Middletown Journal, there was an editorial reprinted from The Columbus Dispatch that really caught my attention. The last few paragraphs of the editorial that grabbed me, and they read as follows:

"When it comes to the public’s business and public records, the benefit of the doubt should go to openness, transparency and accountability.

Secrecy should be suspect.

Secrecy promotes abuse; openness promotes reform."

Apparently, the editor of The Columbus Dispatch has never spent much time around Middletown, its government, and its local politics!

No matter how often and how loudly local officials allege an affinity for “openness” and “transparency” in this city’s business, their actions just do not back up their words!!!

It seems as if everything continues to be settled behind closed doors.

There has yet to be any public discourse on the mis-named “Citizen” subcommittees that council members actually want to be “mini-council meetings”. In fact, council members can’t even seem to remember which of their members they self-appointed to which subcommittee.

Did any honest Middletonians (with good hearing, unlike myself) have lunch at the Frisch’s on Germantown Road last week? If so, can you share with us what was discussed at the “open meeting” of five members of a local city council, the law director of that city, and a local city manager??? If I was a resident of that group’s city, I would have been livid. Instead of shoving it in their citizens faces, at least they had the decency to go somewhere out of town for their illegal meeting (or did they?). Of course, they probably were just discussing their outrage at the fact that the similarly-named posers of their city’s CIC have not yet been identified.

It’s strange that the members of the board of Middletown’s CIC have not expressed outrage that another group so similarly named is skulking around town, and that nothing is being done to expose the posers.

Of course, we here in Middletown are not like Columbus, are we? Our city officials are all in favor of OPENNESS and TRANSPARENCY, aren’t they??? I hear them SAY it all the time ... at least all of the times that they think someone might be listening!