NEWSLETTER | Gardening At Night

This has not been the easiest week to be the editor of a community newspaper. I often tell our readers to “Brace for Impact.”

Well, last week was certainly impactful. Sometimes the news makes you mad, and sometimes it makes you happy. Sometimes the news is sad and other times it is enlightening and uplifting.

It is our job to tell you the news, not to tell you how to feel about it.

Over the last seven days, we delivered some difficult news and some encouraging news. We have seen some highs and lows.

**DIGGING IN FOR TEAM BIDDEFORD** | Wednesday’s groundbreaking ceremony for the Thatcher Brook development

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So, let’s talk about Biddeford City Manager Truc Dever’s sudden and unexpected resignation. Let’s talk about the tragic and untimely death of a Biddeford man who was close to my family. Two weeks ago, Michael Peterson was joking with my wife at a grocery store, today his family is making funeral arrangements after a Friday motorcycle accident in Saco.

Let’s also talk about the heartbreaking loss of a beloved Biddeford teacher who also served her community as a brave and principled city councilor. Thankfully, Kitty Goudreau passed away in relative comfort surrounded by the love of her family.

Our student athletes also rode the wave of wins and losses this week. The BHS varsity baseball team shut out the Portland Bulldogs but then a few days later faced a tough loss against Noble High School on Friday.

After weeks of public acrimony and marathon meetings, the city seems on course to present a budget that seems reasonable – at least when compared to where we started in March.

We all had to make some compromises. No one got everything they wanted this week. We were all losers and we were all winners.

Welcome to Team Biddeford.

At the Gazette, we treated the city’s manager’s resignation like the significant news that it was – and that it remains. Many people were stunned. Now, we have to ask ourselves some questions.

How do we proceed from here? What are we willing to sacrifice? Can we find middle ground? Are we ready to compromise, or are we just going to dig our heels into the sand, point fingers and assign blame?

We don’t have the answers. Just lots of questions. It is not our place to say what should happen next.

Our job is to tell you the news. It’s your job to decide what to do with that information.

From our front row seats of watching and experiencing the impacts of this week’s news – including the exciting groundbreaking of a complex that will provide affordable apartments to support our city’s workforce — it occurs to us that we all need to ask ourselves one central question.

Are we a community, or just a collection of individuals who share a ZIP Code?

Our job is to tell you the news
It’s your job to decide what
to do with that information

When asked to comment about the city manager’s resignation, Delilah Poupore — the Heart of Biddeford’s executive director — suggested that maybe it’s time for all of us to put down our phones and step off our individual perches.

“We tend to point fingers at one another,” Poupore said. “If we’re going to succeed, then we need to work together, even if that means we don’t all get everything we want.”

That is a sentiment that strikes us as both reasonable and compelling. And we hope that Poupore and all the others who asked for city for funding this year remember that we ALL have to be willing to sacrifice and simply cannot get everything we want.

Our community is diverse and full of opinions and perspectives. All voices matter. No one should feel rolled over in a community, but as Mick Jagger famously sang: