March 15, 2007

Dear Neighbors and Friends,

In response to Stuart Pace’s letter, reprinted in this newsletter, I would like to say that I, too, am shocked and appalled. I am shocked and appalled that a woman’s illness, resulting in her trip by ambulance to the emergency room, has been used as a political football to smear her name. What have we come to as a community when a neighbor is incapacitated by pain, and we then proceed to publicly chastise her, for weeks, for canceling a meeting?

So much misinformation has circulated about the events surrounding the cancellation of the February meeting, that I feel compelled to set out the chronology of exactly what happened, in order to correct the misinformation contained in Mr. Pace’s letter.

On the afternoon of Monday February 19th, June called me to say she was immobilized with terrible pain. Bob Gulack (my husband) and I went over to see if there was anything we could do. It was clear that June needed an ambulance, so we called one, and she was carried out to the ambulance and taken to Hackensack Medical Center. Before she left she told us that she didn’t know if she would be well by Wednesday evening, and asked us to find out if the meeting could be cancelled.

On Monday evening we began contacting members of the Executive Committee to ask them to sign an agreement canceling the meeting if it became necessary. We did not at that time go to the officers because we were hoping that the meeting could still take place. AT NO TIME DID WE, OR ANY OTHER COMMITTEE CHAIR, MAKE ANY DECISION THAT THE MEETING WOULD NOT TAKE PLACE. Mr. Pace is simply wrong to state that committee chairs decided anything.

June came home late on Monday night, still in pain and medicated. On Tuesday morning she realized that she would not be well enough to leave her house by the following evening. She asked Mike Roney to call Ted King, Chris Nunn and Han Broekmann and tell them that she needed to cancel the CA meeting. At 10:49 a.m. a posting went up on Fair Lawn Speaks (from Chris Nunn via Julia Enerson) announcing the meeting was cancelled. Mr. Pace asks why the officers were not contacted by June. Is he really asking why a sick woman, in pain and on medication, would not personally make several telephone calls?

On Tuesday evening, June received a telephone call from a resident, telling her that Ted King was planning to hold a CA meeting. Even though she was still heavily medicated, she called Ted King and left a message on his answering machine stating that she had heard that he was conducting the meeting even though the meeting had been cancelled. She also called Chris Nunn and Han Broekman, asking them to call her. Mr. King called her back at 7:30 a.m. the following morning. He became angry with her and told her never to call his house again. Chris Nunn never returned June’s telephone call. Han Broekman sent June a fax on Wednesday morning, expressing his concern for her health and acknowledging that the meeting was cancelled. Han apologized for not calling the previous evening, stating that he had just returned from vacation.

Mr. Pace asks why a flyer canceling the meeting was distributed without a vote of the three officers. The flyer was distributed only after we heard that Ms. Nunn and Mr. King were planning to hold the meeting. We had not completed getting signatures from the entire Executive Committee the previous day, because once we saw the posting on Fair Lawn Speaks on Tuesday morning from Ms. Nunn, we assumed that the officers were on board with the cancellation and we saw no point in doing anything further. When we learned on Tuesday evening that this was not so, and that a meeting was planned, we neither had the time to get any more signatures, nor did we think there would be any point in asking the officers to sign a sheet of paper canceling the meeting, given that two of them had just stated their intentions to hold that meeting.

Mr. Pace also charges my husband and others with attempting to block people from meeting in the Grange Feb. 21. Bob and the others were simply there to make sure that anyone entering the building was offered a copy of the same Notice canceling the meeting that had previously been distributed to the entire community. Does Mr. Pace really think than anyone would have tried to physically block people from entering the building?

Mr. Pace calls the committee chairs “self-appointed.” The fact that all of them had been duly appointed by June was announced in the February newsletter, before this whole incident involving June’s illness.

When June became ill, she had two choices – she could have canceled the meeting or she could have asked the vice president to chair the meeting. She chose the former. Not everyone may agree with that choice, but common decency should dictate that the only human response was to wish her well and say “see you in March.”

Zdena Nemeckova