Turkington’s Firing: You Reap What You Sow

There has been a lot of comment about the recent firing of the Town Administrator Fred Turkington with some people supporting it and some people opposing it. However it seems that there has been a unanimous sentiment that the firing was not handled correctly as far as giving the residents and the Board of Selectmen (BOS) an opportunity to discuss and debate the decision.

I would like to offer a lone opinion that Turkington’s firing was handled correctly and in line with the behavior that Turkington had engaged in himself and in line with the behavior that the two BOS members that opposed his firing, namely Steven Correia and Joseph Nolan, had also engaged in.

My name is Mark Frishman and I was a resident of Wayland for 5 years until March 2012. For the last few years of my life in Wayland I was embroiled in an acrimonious battle with the Town involving my dog.

On August 3, 2009 I was summoned to a BOS meeting to consider the banishment of my dog. The meeting included Correia, Nolan and Turkington. At that meeting the BOS was hesitant to banish my dog and decided to hold another hearing involving the dog control officer. It was plain to see that Turkington was irritated with the decision of the BOS to not banish the dog right there. No firm date was set for the next meeting and my wife and I asked the BOS to give us an advance notice of the meeting since we were spending long weekends on the Cape and were only coming back home late on Monday nights – the day that the BOS meetings are held.

Two weeks later when we arrived home Monday night on August 17, we found a voicemail on our answering machine left that Sunday by somebody at Town Hall, probably Turkington’s secretary, informing us that the hearing was to be that Monday. We later found out that the hearing was held without us and our dog was banished at that meeting.

I have always believed that Turkington deliberately delayed informing us of the meeting to sabotage our ability to present our case. However it is also clear that Correia and Nolan were perfectly fine to hold a hearing where we should have been present and where we were inexplicably absent despite our obvious vested interest in the outcome.

It is therefore that I must admit my obvious pleasure at the fact that Turkington has been fired and the circumstances of his firing. I savored every minute of the videotaped meeting where Correia and Nolan expressed their exasperation at being blindsided by the motion to fire Turkington. At least they had an opportunity to voice their objections – something I never had a chance to do.

It is probably a foregone conclusion that Correia and Nolan will lose their next election for a seat on the BOS. A question begs why they don’t resign right now given the climate of voter dissatisfaction that brought about the current majority at the BOS that was responsible for Turkington’s firing.

My only suggestion for the current BOS is that they finish their work by firing Town Counsel Mark Lanza. Lanza defended the Town in the recent lawsuit where the Town is on the hook for $1.2 million. Surely Lanza pocketed a pretty penny defending the Town, but perhaps had he been more competent, the whole lawsuit could have been avoided. In my own lawsuit against many Town officials (including Turkington, Correia and Nolan), Lanza is the main defendant. I hold him mostly responsible for events that brought about my lawsuit. Again, he charged the Town tens of thousands of dollars to prosecute multiple unlawful actions against me, which have all been rebuffed by the court, and now the Town’s insurance company has to defend the Town officials because of his unethical behavior.

But to end on a positive note, it is really striking to me how quickly Wayland has been transformed by the recent elections. I applaud the citizens of Wayland bringing to life a “government of the people, for the people”.

Mark Frishman