At the last meeing of the Mexico Planning Board, the chairman asked the town manager to draft an ordinance related to the secret ballot article voted successfully on June 13.

That was, in itself, an insult to the referendum committee that was supposed to draft the ordinance if the article passed. The referendum committee is composed of eight taxpayers and the five selectmen.

The town manager, who has been adamantly opposed to the notion of voting in the privacy of the voting booth, wrote the ordinance, condensing the numbers of articles in the warrant and limiting the number of votes to one if an article would fail. He must believe that voters cannot or don’t want to vote on each budgeted item. Yet in Jay, the voters there have voted on each budget item since 1997.

Maybe the town manager believes that the voters in Mexico are not as smart as the voters in Jay?

I am not in support of the ordinance as it stands, and hope others will join me in rejecting it at the public hearing on Oct. 11.

Gary W. Coffin, Mexico