This morning’s Coeur d’Alene Press published a letter to the editor by School District 271 Trustee Tom Hamilton.  Hamilton’s letter was a response to a My Turn opinion column written by Adam Graves published in Saturday’s Coeur d’Alene Press.

In his opinion column, Graves criticized School District 271 trustees for not sending even one trustee to a fund-raising auction for one of the local schools.

In his response to Graves, Hamilton observes, “Knowing that formal invitations (likely printed by your firm) were mailed to several District Administrators, the board [SD 271 Board of Trustees] is left to assume that your failure to extend the same invitation to the trustees could only be an act of omission, deliberate or otherwise. Could it be that an opportunity to slander the board was your intent all along?”

Hamilton reasonably asks if Graves was trying to manufacture a situation that would result in an opportunity for them to attack elected officials.  This scheme has been tried before here in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. 

In OpenCdA’s December 11, 2012, post titled Measuring Public Officials’ Performance, we reported how Coeur d’Alene City Councilman Mike Kennedy had openly attacked Kootenai County Clerk Cliff Hayes and accused Hayes of “dereliction of duty” for not attending a City Council meeting at which the Council had erroneously believed it still had a duty to canvass the 2011 election.  (It did not have that duty.  The law had changed.)  As Hayes noted in his letter of response to Kennedy’s ignorant and unwarranted attack, the law governing the 2011 election did not require that a representative of Hayes’ office be present at the Council meeting.  Hayes’ letter went on to state that had he been asked to send someone or invited to attend personally to answer questions on behalf of the County Clerk’s Office, he would have.

It would appear that Adam Graves has been taking lessons from Councilman Kennedy.   We hope he didn’t pay for them.  Graves might have spent his money better studying real issues and learning Socratic debate.