November 18, 2013
Dear Mr. Mallamo,
Thank you for your note. Adrienne and I had hoped for an opportunity to talk with you about the Fort Ward History Work Group. Your comments at Wednesday nights Fort Ward Park & Museum Advisory Group Meeting were even more troubling than your written comments of October 31, 2013.
We are interested in responding to your request. However, it’s important to be clear on the following facts since you did imply that we were under your command and indicated that we had not lived up to our duties and responsibilities in your line of command.
First, we are voluntarily assisting the city in this community-driven effort. We do not have any agreement with your office as to what services we are to provide you.
Second, as you noted, you did create the Fort Ward History Work Group, and as a result it is not an official City of Alexandria advisory group. When you created it you did not provide any guidance to the group other than to say you wanted the group to be open to the public and for the participants to provide information to the Office of Historic Alexandria for use in the Fort Ward Park decision-making process. The group has no guidelines from the city or your office as to what we should and shouldn’t be doing.
Third, since the Fort Ward Park & Museum Advisory Group does not have any formal guidance for it’s activities from the City of Alexandria, no functional relationship between that group and the work group has been described.
We note these facts because in your written and verbal comments you have been asserting that we have not met your expectations in terms of performance of the duties that we have been performing. Your recent expectations seem to be, frankly, arbitrary and capricious at best, destructive at worst. The group is the creation of your office, however, it is entirely inappropriate to treat, and mistreat, us as employees at your beck and call.
We are more than willing to assist your efforts to help insure that good decision-making return to Fort Ward Park. Our response to your specific requests follows:
1. The e-mail list of work group members and OHA staff who are on your meeting notification list has been provided to your office in the past. I suggest that you search your office’s files for this information. We can provide you with copies of the sign-in sheets from meetings we have held. We can scan this information and send it to you electronically. Let us know if you would like us to do that for you.
We also use social-media to reach a large number of individuals you are interested in the work going on at Fort Ward. Despite some of the concerns of some Advisory Group members social-media sites are part of an effective public outreach effort.
2. Your interest in the dates and meeting notices to which work group members and OHA staff were notified during the past year is best retrieved by your office staff from their own computers. Over the course of the life of the work group we have mailed notices to hundreds and hundreds of individuals. Messages sent to members and the public are the same messages sent to you and your staff. Communications did not discriminate between OHA staff and other
- 3. Meeting minutes were never a requirement of this group. The tradition of
keeping a summary of the meetings was done as a public outreach technique to inform and inspire the members and others about the work of the group. As you may recall early in this effort Pam Cressey and I did the bulk of this note taking. When Adrienne and I were elected by the members to be the co-chairs of the work group, at a meeting you did not attend, our roles changed and formal note taking for some meetings was not determined to be necessary since, aside from the election of co-chairs, this group is a research and non-voting organization.
4. This letter confirms that we distributed the public presentation notice to FWHWG members, as I requested in my email of October 31, 2013.
I hope this is helpful to you. Please let us know if you would like to meet to discuss the work group activities, or the contents of this message, further.
Sincerely,
Glenn
- Glenn Eugster
Adrienne
Adrienne Terrell Washington
Co-Chairs, Fort Ward History Work Group
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