The "front & center" issue now as regards the ARA & the City:

The Attleboro Municipal Council will be having a "special meeting" this coming Tuesday evening, Feb. 25th.  [Normally, it's a committee meeting night.]

The proper focus should be:  how the ARA and the City is going to pay a court judgment to the tune of about 1.7 million dollars, for court-ordered back salaries, benefits, interest, and expenses.   It's needless, stupid waste.

Why is the ARA and the City LIABLE for this debt?   Because, aside from all other issues regarding the ARA, Mayor Dumas was found to have violated proper process and Mass. law by his chosen method to try to return the leadership of the ARA to City Hall, reporting to the mayor's office.   All the court decisions were against the ARA and its legal representation, R. Mangiaratti, on loan from the mayor to the ARA.   No other fact or allegation can prevail against this albeit narrow point, though this is not to say or even to suggest that other facts regarding the ARA have no merit.   Those things are for another day, though they will certainly be continued to be used to obfuscate and confuse the issue at hand now:  the court-ordered judgment as referenced above, and from where will the money be found and taken.

According to court documents, the ARA continuously had three (3) sources of money for ARA employee salaries, among which was the "urban renewal bond". Yet the 'new' ARA Board, under the undue influence of K. Dumas, claimed that the ARA, in Oct. '09, had no source left for employee salaries.   How can that claim be still believed in the face of repeated appeals court rulings otherwise?

Any claim that the ARA was close to bankruptcy because of careless over-spending is immaterial to the narrow question as to whether M. Malinoski and M. Ross were dismissed from their jobs legally, given that, by state law, all such redevelopment authorities' employees are civil service.   The courts repeatedly determined that there was not the legal requirement of "just cause" in this case.   Good, bad, or indifferent----thus is Mass. law.   None have the right by any rationale to thwart, evade, or deny the rule of law.   The law must prevail, by definition, or we promote anarchy.

In reality, even if the ARA was teetering on insolvency, the City and its mayor had no legal authority to try to have the ARA executive director removed in such or other circumstance.   That belongs exclusively to the Board of Directors of the ARA (though the mayor has the power of appointment for four of the five members of said Board).   That is the Commonwealth's "design-by-law" for all redevelopment authorities established in Massachusetts.   If such design is bad, then it should be changed.   But in the meantime, we all must obey the law as written and in effect at any given time.