Editorial
Bragging
rights all wrong
Gray
Manager Mitchell A. Berkowitz 
did
a strange thing recently. He gave Nathan Tsukroff
of The Gray News his private performance evaluation
to publish.
Personnel documents are confidential and according
to the law, "not open to public inspection."
Mr. Berkowitz has been in Municipal Administration
for 30 years, and by this point in his career, must
know that nosy reporters can ask all they want, but
that he certainly does not have to comply with requests
to produce confidential documents.
So the question is, why did he do it? We asked him,
twice, but he refused to answer. If it wasn't a demonstration
of massive ignorance of the Freedom of Access Law...then
it had to be because he chose to.
The Gray Town Council has conducted an executive session
to discuss their expectations of the Manager's duties
and assignments. They've scheduled another executive
session to deliver those expectations to the Manager.
Other than that, and some minor public frustration
with his untimely delivery to Council of documents
related to Order 35, there hasn't been anything public
from the Council about the Manager's performance.
Which is the way it should be. Even former Vice-Chair
Lynn Olson said last week that "it is not legal
to discuss performance issues in such a public/budget
process as they should only be presented within an
individual performance evaluation situation."
In a misguided attempt to win points in his invisible
battle, Mr. Berkowitz saw an opportunity to co-opt
a Town Office-friendly publication with a history
of protecting government instead of citizens, and
took his fears public. The result is that the evaluation,
and all comments in it, are now open.
In the evaluation, the Council acknowledged that the
public perceives that the Manager is not a good listener
and has a personal agenda. Hmmm. He scored higher
on "Relationships with Others" than he did
on "Relationships with Council." Ouch. Worst
of all there was some harsh and specific criticism
of some Town Departments, several of which are staffed
by one person. It's not hard to guess who the Council
meant.
Having read what is now a public document, those staffers
mentioned in the Manager's performance evaluation
have been compromised. Releasing one's personnel evaluation
is a transparent move to protect #1, which shameless
enough when you're supposed to lead by example, but
to publicly compromise others in the process is unconscionable.
In the end, the irony is this. According to the results,
Mr. Berkowtiz's last performance evaluation was a
score of 3.81 out of 5. Translated to both a numerical
and a letter scale, that performance result equals
only a grade of 76.2 on a scale of 100. I think that
is a D+ at Cheverus. Ouch.
Editorial
By Elizabeth Prata
To respond: editor@monumentnews.com, or 657-5353.
