The MTA, as we have come to learn, is autonomous.

You can proceed with your proposed plan and legally no one can stop you. You can walk on our property. You can take our land and homes, and legally no one can stop you. You are not accountable to the governor, to the State Legislature or to the citizens of Maine.

Accountability is an ethical concept.

Because you gentleman have the "legal" capacity to do something - and are accountable to no one - I believe you must have the highest standards of honesty, integrity, moral values. Without these standards, the process can and will dissolve to what Chairman Conley called "a frenzy."

You are held accountable for what you say and do.

I have three examples:

  • LD 534 provides the MTA shall hold informational session with interested parties.

In your letter to the Transportation Committee dated Dec. 19, 2007, you requested extra time to present your report, stating an essential component of LD 534 is public participation. Your report to the Transportation Committee is dated Feb. 15, 2008; no meeting was held with interested parties before your report was written.

  • The minutes of your meeting dated April 17, 2008, state a public meeting will be held around July 2 to discuss the three options: no build, build at current site, build on another site. How can this be possible if you will be naming the final site before July 2?
  • Dan Paradee stated in the April 27 Portsmouth Herald, "the MTA operates more as a business." That statement is misleading. If the MTA were operating or acting like a business in this age of accountability you would be out of business. A business cannot operate if it violates a resolve passed by the state legislature. A business cannot operate if it places people at the bottom of its list of priorities on your matrix.

Your actions - though legal - have caused grief and anger; have taken away a sense of security. Your actions - though legal - have caused adults and children to wake at night with nightmares of individuals taking away their homes. Your actions - though legal - have caused small children to ask their grandparents if Santa Claus will know where they have gone.

Your actions have forever changed individual's lives. These are facts you cannot change. What can be changed is how you gentlemen choose to proceed. You can choose to operate with the highest standards of honesty, integrity and moral values.

I challenge each of you to reevaluate your processes. I challenge each of you gentlemen to look in the mirror, to ask your wives, your children, your grandchildren how would they react - how would they feel if someone told them their home would be taken, their lives disrupted.

If you choose, you have an opportunity to stop children's nightmares, to stop the gut-wrenching fear that has invaded so many York families.

You have the power to ruin lives forever. You need to take great care with that type of power. If you make a mistake and lives are ruined it will be because you chose not to be accountable.