Billings, Carty issue 'I'm sorry' Valentines to Inter-Lakes board

MEREDITH — It seemed at last week's budget hearing that there was no love lost between much of the Inter-Lakes School Board and board member Jack Carty and Meredith resident Mark Billings. After a week-long separation, though, the two, who had issued sharp criticism of the board, sought to patch things up at last night's meeting.

Billings, at the budget hearing, had called "unconscionable" the board's withholding until a day before the budget hearing of details of a newly-negotiated teacher's union contract. At the hearing, he called the contract a "spit in the face of the taxpayers," accusing the board of failing to substantially address escalating health care costs.

At last night's board meeting, though, Billings apologized for the comments. "I was out of line. You people deserve our sincere thanks for the work that you do." He said he had been in contact with board chair Richard Hanson in the interim, and was reminded that, "when words are used to incite and polarize, you never get a good outcome."

He was motivated to make the comments, Billings said, out of his passion for education, frustration at the process and fear that health care costs could soon grow to become a crippling burden on the district. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have seen the enemy. His name is health care and he is formidable... this is a huge problem and it is eating away at our educational system."

Likewise, and during a later portion of the meeting, Carty sought to dampen his complaint at the budget hearing that members of the board's negotiating team had failed to keep the rest of the board abreast of the proceedings. The negotiated contract was presented to the board on January 24, he said, at which point members voted to ratify the agreement.

"The point I was trying to make was there may have been differing perceptions of transparency up to that point," he said, noting that he's since encountered "widely varying" interpretations of transparency in that context.

"It was not my intent to insult the chairman or other members of the school board," Carty said. "I'd like to put this one to bed and move on."

After hearing both conciliatory statements, Kay Anderson said, "I was hoping for both apologies." She serves on the board's strategic planning committee with both Billings and Carty and said that after the budget hearing last week she was planning to attend last night's meeting with the intention of resigning over a breach of trust.

"It's absolutely essential, for the process to work, that we trust each other," she said.

Anderson said she has worked through several negotiation processes and, "it was very difficult for me" to watch the negotiating team endure the salvo of criticism. After last night's peace-making efforts, though, Anderson said, "Some of my trust is coming back, so I'm not resigning... Let's have this be a bad bump in the road and continue to go forward as a team."