I submitted the piece below to the Daily News as a response to a Town Crier column that ran last night.
In his Town Crier piece last Wednesday, Clifton Anderson granted that “in America, Wilson has the right to his own opinions, of course.” And precisely because this is an op-ed page in America, I am also happy to say that Anderson has a right to his opinions as well. But neither of us have a right to our own facts.
The factual errors in Mr. Anderson’s piece were glaring, and, as I will explain in a moment, they were entirely contradictory to the basic point he was seeking to make. He intimated that it was somehow “possible for [me] to escape complying with various governmental rules and regulations.” He said that I opened “a boys’ school in a downtown building with no fire escapes.” He said that I was “trying to get around the rules that govern Moscow.” He says that I personally “chose to locate” NSA downtown. All of these charges are demonstrably, factually, wrong.
I have not opened a boys’ school anywhere. Other than wishing them well, I have no organizational connection with Atlas boys’ school at all. But according to local conspiracy buffs, I own and operate all kinds of entities that I really have no connection to at all.
I do have a relationship with NSA in that I am one board member among many. So “I” did not make any decision about moving NSA downtown. Moving on to the zoning issues, and not content with saying that NSA was (in his view) out of compliance with the zoning code as written, Mr. Anderson said that I was “trying” to get around the rules that govern Moscow. But as the P&Z meeting last Wednesday night made abundantly clear, NSA is only out of compliance in the same way that Moscow High School is. And it is obvious that if there really is a problem, then it is a problem with the code, not the schools.
Before we made the decision to move NSA downtown, we (not I) checked with all the appropriate authorities. We obtained an occupancy permit, which Mr. Anderson could have easily verified. We purchased a building that had been vacant for two years, refurbished it, and moved into that building with the blessing of the city. As a side note, some might have a preference for our building in its vacant condition. The advantage of such vacant buildings downtown is that they cause no parking problems whatever. If you busted out of few of the windows, you would have even fewer parking problems. And after a few years of this kind of approach to downtown revitalization, you won’t be able to give parking spaces away.
Parking downtown can be difficult. But we need to note what kind of problem this actually is-a very good one. Even though we have two malls in town, and the city continues to develop outward the way many other towns have done, our downtown is still a vibrant place-a bunch of people want to park there. We need to work together to keep it that way, which should not include harassing the people who have helped to make it such a vibrant place.
But back to the story. A couple years after our occupancy permit was obtained, some people with a personal axe to grind raised a zoning question about us. They raised it with NSA alone, even though their particular interpretation of the code affects multiple schools, including Moscow High. Whatever you might want to call this, it is not an instance of me thinking the laws don’t apply to me.
Now the irony is that Mr. Anderson published these accusations in the midst of a column where he was lamenting how people can be driven apart because they believe crazy things they hear about others. He cited the case of an elderly Lutheran who thought that local Catholics were stockpiling weapons. He cited the case of mild-mannered people telling horrendous stories about the “supposed barbarity of blacks and other minorities.” Having urged this valuable lesson upon us, Mr. Anderson then proceeded to do exactly the same thing that he was warning us against. He passed on erroneous information about a group he knew almost next to nothing about and he did so without checking his facts.
The basic point of Mr. Anderson’s column was a good one. But I am afraid that when it comes to application of it in our town, we still have a long way to go.