Mashpee Needs You - Editorial
When visiting Mashpee Town Hall this week, one of the bulletin boards caught our eye. Anyone who has passed through the main lobby recently will know what board we are talking about—it is absolutely smothered in printouts, nearly all of them seeking town employees or volunteers to staff departments, boards and committees.
There are so many needs to be filled in town: Mashpee Public Schools needs substitute teachers and paraprofessionals; the building department needs various on-call inspectors; the library is looking for a full-time youth services librarian; and there are openings for secretaries and building monitors. And that is all before we even get to the committees and boards.
The Annual Town Election, of course, is coming up, and residents are starting to pull papers for the elected seats on the select board, planning board, library trustees and water commission, to name a few. But there are even more committee seats open in Mashpee: there is one on the finance committee and one on the council on aging; the board of health is in need of a clerk, and the affordable housing committee only has two dedicated members, plus a select board liaison. And Mashpee’s newest group, the Freshwater Ponds Committee, is looking to recruit eight volunteers.
Mashpee is a very multi-faceted town, with so many intelligent citizens. One thing we would like to see is for more of those people to break out of their shell and into municipal government. The town is lucky to have so many well-known individuals who have been and still are entrenched in its operations, but there is always room for more.
We see so many of the same people serving on the town’s various committees and boards—which is not, of course, a bad thing—but knowing what we know about how passionate some of Mashpee’s residents are, and seeing the chatter that we have seen online over the last six or so months, we cannot help but wonder when people will start doing something about it. Posting in the Mashpee Facebook groups about what is or is not working in town will only get you so far—there needs to be something tangible, some sort of action that reaches beyond the confines of our phone and laptop screens.
Mashpee does not need any more keyboard warriors; it needs public-facing individuals ready to enact some real-world action for the benefit of the town. Hopping on Facebook to post complaints or qualms about the town’s goings-on is easy. What’s not so easy, though, is doing something about it.
We would bet that nearly every member of the select board, the zoning board or any other board started out the same way: as a resident with an opinion. The difference? They went out and did something about it. Will you?