Hello, Freeporters! First, a bit of bitter-sweet news: I got some extra vacation time this week, and I'm going to be heading on a small trip with my girlfriend. Unfortunately, I will not be able to cover the May 24th Board of Trustees meeting, myself. On the plus side, I'm hoping to have a guest-reporter step in, and maybe even more! We'll see, but I don't want to promise what I can't deliver. I do hope that as many of The Weekly Freeporter's readers as possible will make it; it'll be an interesting time, to be sure!
On that note, I'm happy to announce that The Weekly Freeporter has conducted its first interview. I sat down yesterday in lovely Cow Meadow Park with two of the three administrators of the “Keeping the Freeport Festival on the Nautical Mile” Facebook page, a political lightning rod which just prior to the interview hit 3,800 members. It was one of the first major Facebook pages to be formed about the Village of Freeport, and has attracted a tremendous following that helped rally the Village around political issues across the spectrum.
Michael Suchan, the founder of the group, described his reasons for creating the group to be “a little bit of both” concerns over the way Freeport Mayor Andrew Hardwick was handling the Nautical Mile Festival, and the rumors he was hearing about the location of the festival being changed, or of its outright cancellation. Jason Bass, a second administrator who joined shortly after the group's founding, added that he joined because he “wanted to find the truth on this” issue.
With so many issues and rumors floating around, Mr. Bass discovered to his chagrin that “nobody was recording the minutes” of Village Hall meetings; or, if they were, they were extremely hard to get hold of. They related to me how Village residents stood up and asked questions at Board of Trustee meetings, and how the answers they received only seemed to fuel the rumors, at first. As the movement grew, however, Village Hall had to take notice, and eventually they made clear what the situation for the Festival was. “One day in 2010, June fifth,” Mr. Suchan stated plainly, “with June Sixth as a rain-date.” On next year's Festival, however, they were more optimistic – their group has been working closely with Nautical Mile business owners, they stated, in order to make sure that the next year's festival would be “complete.”
As one of the first – and perhaps, still, the largest – Facebook pages discussing Freeport community activism, they've also fallen under fire from other community leaders for their way of doing things. Mr. Suchan didn't seem phased by this, offering the opinion that “We just keep with the movement we started, and keep trying to do the right thing.” Mr. Bass concurred, offering his well-wishes. “I'm proud that a lot of the followers of our site took a handle on other issues that [Mayor] Hardwick was dealing with,” he added.
With their involvement with the Nautical Mile Festival coming to an end, as both they and the Village itself are turning its future over to the area's businesses – a third incarnation of the Festival that is much closer to its original, business-sponsored format than today's Village-sponsored one – my interviewees offered both advice and possible next stops for their energies. “If we want Freeport to get better,” Mr. Bass counciled, “we must figure out, first, what changes we expected, and what will we do in order to work on these changes ourselves?”
For Mr. Suchan, his next stop might be an interesting one. “The incinerator issue is burned,” he mused, “maybe I'll focus on education.” He also advised that “we have to come together as a community to face these issues. We need to focus on local politics.” Mr. Bass's next endeavors were more concrete – literally. “The roads,” he simply stated, “and to educate people on local elections so this doesn't happen again.” He realized that the condition of Freeport's roads were a minor nuisance to many, but proposed that it was the issue that was most present in his daily life.
Both men, however, had one clear objective, one dictum that underscored their reasons for their involvement: “Its for the community.”
You can find the “Keeping the Freeport Festival on the Nautical Mile” Facebook group by clicking its name. And don't forget to visit the Nautical Festival on June 5th; with June 6th as its rain-date!
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