Town crier

A small-town publisher pushes local officials to conduct the public's business in public

by Dan Kennedy

One night in mid April, the Hull Times got a special delivery: a copy of a report on a promotion controversy within the fire department that the weekly had been trying to obtain since January, pushed through a mail slot when no one was around. The paper had appealed to the secretary of state's public-records division in an effort to force the town to produce the document. Now, with the report in hand, the Times could write it up and drop its appeal.

But that's not what publisher Susan Ovans did. Instead, she ran an editorial asserting that the Times would not write about the report until the documents had been produced through proper legal channels. "We were frankly surprised to receive it because we had made it a point of honor not to seek the document from any source other than through a records request to the town itself," Ovans wrote, adding: "We believe this entire fiasco proves once again that the best way to deal with the public's business is in public." After the editorial appeared, a police officer -- a neighbor -- showed up and asked her to turn over her copy of the report. She refused. "He took it well," she says, laughing and fiddling with a pair of reading glasses.

In an era of get-along, go-along corporate media, Ovans's stand on principle is rare indeed. In her case, though, it's hardly unusual. A 48-year-old South Boston native who's lived in Hull since 1973, Ovans lost her job at the Times in the mid '80s when the publisher objected to her stand in favor of controlling runaway condo development. "Since the publisher of the paper then was making a lot of money from those condos, he summarily fired me," says Ovans, who got mad and even: she started a competing paper, the Hull Newsweekly. And in 1989, when her former boss gave the Times to his soon-to-be-ex-wife as part of a divorce settlement, the Newsweekly and the Times combined their operations. Ovans bought out the ex-wife's share eight years ago.

The fire-department controversy is one of those ugly little disputes that are common in small towns. Fire Chief James Russo's brother, Christopher, was one of four candidates for a vacant captain's post. Because of that conflict, a consultant was hired to rank the candidates. Christopher Russo reportedly came in first, despite talk that he had finished fourth in the civil-service exam. He dropped out of contention after questions were raised, and the selectmen hired a lawyer to investigate. Times reporter Rod Young requested a copy of the lawyer's report, as well as information on how much it had cost. Town manager Phil Lemnios rejected the request, citing exemptions in the state's public-records law pertaining to ongoing personnel matters and privacy protections.

"I have real problems with town officials who decide what we're going to put out -- like somehow they're going to decide what to publish and not me," says Ovans, sitting in her tiny office (which is located, ironically, right next to the fire station). "That's an outrage to me." As for why she refuses to go ahead and report on the investigation's findings now that she has a copy, Ovans says simply, "Because I want to make them do what's lawful. I don't think that they should be allowed to get away with just being totally unresponsive to a lawful request."

Bill Ketter, chairman of Boston University's journalism department, considered Ovans a "spirited" competitor during his years as editor of the Quincy Patriot Ledger. "That's a public record, and I agree that the newspaper should insist on a ruling," Ketter says. "I admire the Hull Times for taking this to the secretary of state."

Hull, with a population of 10,528, is a town in transition. Located on the South Shore, on a small spit of land jutting out into Boston Harbor, it has traditionally been a working-class and lower-middle-class enclave among far more affluent neighbors such as Hingham, Cohasset, and Duxbury. Isolated and difficult to reach, it has nevertheless begun the inevitable process of gentrification, as well-heeled yuppies and retirees are drawn to Nantasket Beach and to the striking view of the Boston skyline. A house that Ovans swears would have gone for $200,000 two years ago just sold for $750,000. The old Fitzgerald estate, where Honey Fitz and his family spent their weekends, is on the market for more than $1 million.

The town's geographic isolation has worked in favor of Ovans's independence: the Hull Times, a black-and-white tabloid with a circulation of about 3000, is simply too small and out of the way for any of the chains to be interested in it. Her husband, Roger Jackson, takes pictures and runs the business operations, and her daughters, who'll soon be moving away, have worked for the paper as well. "If the Times became part of a chain, it would badly disservice the town," Ovans says. "I don't want to disparage what other papers do, but they have become really unnecessarily sanitized. They don't want to take a stand."

Next door at the fire station, no one was talking the other night -- neither a genial firefighter standing out front nor a wary captain who'd just returned from a medical call. "You won't get anything here," the captain said, walking away. Clearly the fire department probe has been painful for Hull. Town manager Lemnios describes the public-records request as routine, saying, "We have very good relations with the Hull Times. It's just a disagreement." Yet both Lemnios and town counsel Jim Lampke say that if the secretary of state's office orders them to turn over the documents, they might instead take further legal steps to keep the information from being officially released. (Brian McNiff, the spokesman for Secretary of State Bill Galvin, says a ruling could come "fairly soon" -- perhaps as early as this week.)

It's all been a bit wearying and disillusioning to Ovans. "They're making me cynical about my own government, and it angers me," she says. "I work really hard at not getting cynical. I might take everything they say with a grain of salt. But I try not to be cynical about it."

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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