Editor,

Yesterday I witnessed a vigilante mob lynch an outstanding public servant.

Scott Dudley and his dopes spewed bitter half-truths and intimidated our elected board officials to fire Island Transit Director Martha Rose.

Bob Clay, Helen Price-Johnson, Jim Campbell and the rest of you board members: do you really think making Martha a scapegoat and bowing to McCarthyism is going to make the silent majority vote for you next go-around? The answer is, “oh no.”

You and the state auditors saw the same false information that Martha did, and none of you raised a red flag either.

This error was so hidden nobody recognized it, including the state auditors we pay tens of thousands of dollars to every year to catch this type of an error.

Most of those of us who worked with Martha over the years are all angry and shocked that this type of a lynching was approved by the board, especially before even getting the audit report.

Martha built this organization into a national–award-winning agency and worked for years getting the grants to build this much-needed facility. The angry “employees” that write letters to the editor are 90 percent disgruntled ex-employees who were fired for not doing their jobs.

Martha has given her heart to this community and fell prey to an incompetent finance manager.

Once she recognized the problem, she took strong action to pull our agency out of a financial nose dive. And she developed a financial plan that could do it. We couldn’t be in a more precarious point in our recovery to lose her guidance now.

We, and I speak for most of the employees of Island Transit, are heartbroken, disillusioned and disgusted at you self-serving politicians. What is the world coming to where McCarthyism is allowed to be practiced?

SANDRA KUYKENDALL

acting finance manager

Island Transit