At the Town Hall meeting Monday, Jan 23, all of the current City Councilors were invited by Bruce Novark to participate in this grassroots process called GOooh. This is a process that invites each of them and every voter to fill out a Citizen Candidate Selection questionnaire, engage in dialogue with the voters on the important issues facing our community and then compete for re-election with other qualified candidates. Amazingly, City Council Chairman Gibson said that he feels the GOooh process is just another special interest.

Since when is a process that actively invites every voter, including the councilors, to educate themselves on important issues facing our community and then participate in citizen caucus process a special interest? Frankly, this is often the reaction of the uninformed and or people who are threatened by citizen based efforts!

Competition is a fantastic thing! Its roots are deeply engrained in our American culture and one of our basic founding principles of our Republic--the free market system. How can competition in our political process that encourages voters to educate themselves, and restore active participation in our political process by every voter be a bad thing?

This GOooh process does not tell you, the voter, what position to take on each of the issues; but it does encourage you to do your homework and take an informed position. Once you have done this, we trust in the citizens to make quality choices.

For the voters’ sake, we hope that Councilor Batte’s reaction is widely shared and that Chairman Gibson’s comment was just a reaction to a process he doesn’t understand. Again, we sincerely invite each voter, including the Councilors,to participate in this citizen based grassroots process and compete for the privilege of serving all the Marco Island Voters.

In Liberty.

Keith Flaugh

Marco Island