Auburn City Manager Pat Finnigan has issued a blistering indictment of the police department and its handling of the Aug. 4 arrest of Mayor Norm Guay on charges of drunken driving.

In August, the city hired a Portland law firm to investigate Guay’s arrest and related police actions. Finnigan refused to release the entire report this week, but did hand over a five-page summary of her impressions.

They are not good, and Finnigan doesn’t hold back. She basically accuses members of department of using police power in an “effort to embarrass, intimidate or discredit political opponents.”

The charges against Guay were eventually dropped by the state Attorney General’s Office.

At the time of Guay’s arrest – and to this day – the city and the union representing members of the police department are locked in a contentious labor dispute. Finnigan makes it clear in her report that she believes the mayor’s arrest and the charges that followed were the result of malicious abuse of power. She also blames the tension surrounding negotiations strictly on the police union.

Only Finnigan and Police Chief Richard Small have seen the report. The City Council, Finnigan said Wednesday, hasn’t even seen the document. That should change.

The report should be released to the public, so we all can form our own impressions about the actions of the police. Right now, we must rely on the impressions of Finnigan, who, by the very nature of her position, cannot be considered completely unbiased.

She is employed by the council and reports to the council, which includes the mayor. She hardly can give an unbiased view of events.

The city has cited the privacy of officers who may face disciplinary actions as the reason for withholding the report. The players in this very public fiasco, for the most part, already have been identified. If punishment befitting the allegations of political intimidation and abuse of power are true, we suspect they will be too severe to stay a secret.

We remain concerned about this report and whether it is reliable. The investigators, after all, were paid by the city. It would carry considerably more clout if the case had been examined by the State Police instead of a private law firm.

Finnigan’s report is scary. If it’s accurate, somebody deserves to be fired. Period.

But we’ll reserve judgment until we see the report. We suspect its 75 pages plus supporting documentation contain a little more nuance than what we’ve been told so far.


Out on a limb


Trees? It was trees hanging too close to high-voltage power lines that caused 50 million people to be left in the dark during August’s blackout. That’s what a report by the Department of Energy has discovered.

Sure, there were other factors. Human error, a computer glitch, a failure in the regional monitoring system all contributed.

But the bottom line is that FirstEnergy in Ohio failed to keep trees off three important transmission lines and a blackout left the Midwest and Northeast out on a limb.

If the DOE is right, then the country’s electricity grid is a lot more fragile than we thought. Instead of spending $23 billion in tax breaks and incentives on an energy bill written by lobbyists, the country should spend that money on fixing the problems with moving electricity from one place to another.

Trees? It’s just hard to believe the damage caused by something so simple.
[email protected]