It is disappointing that our Select Board chair issued an inflammatory statement in the October 22 web story in The Bridge, calling on the Estabrook landowners to be “good citizens” by abandoning their constitutional right to defend their property. Is it to be implied that Concord citizens are “bad citizens” if they continue to exercise their Fifth and 14th Amendment rights? It would seem so. The Select Board statement negates everything our town and our historic fight for a constitutional republic embodies.
Our elected officials sued the property owners and Harvard University and now seem to admonish them for the financial cost of the legal proceedings. However, it is the town officials who bear the responsibility and expense for the unprecedented lawsuit they themselves initiated.
The defendants have a constitutionally guaranteed right to pursue what they think is fair and correct. Would you surrender your due process rights? If we fail to exercise and fight for these essential constitutional rights then we will, certainly, lose our democracy.
Our Select Board chair might instead ask certain Estabrook visitors, who have vandalized, stolen from, and egregiously abused these landowners and their property for years, to be the “good citizens.”
The Estabrook landowners, who have generously opened their properties for decades, certainly do not deserve the “bad citizen” implication.
Denise Haartz
Williams Road
William Becklean
Joan Campbell
Fairhaven Road
