The Chatham Daily News reported on September 1, 2010, that Randy Hope was filing his papers to seek re-election as mayor on Thursday, which he has now formally done.
In comments posted online beneath the article, a blogger asked the media to grill Hope over his connections with other candidates. It suggested local media was too afraid to ask any hard questions of any of the declared candidates. The poster also alleged that the mayor's office may have had something to do with the dissemination of private municipal records which later showed up in an anonymous extortion attempt against another potential mayoral candidate.
Mayor Hope has so far refused to disclose whether anyone was provided with those records, and after a week has not denied the involvement of his office. While this proves nothing, it's surprising he didn't take immediate steps to clear any suspicion.
Another poster commented that they thought Ian McLarty was running as a decoy, and that everyone was talking about Mary Lee probably being up to more tricks. Both have published connections to a person known to be Hope's closest advisor. It suggested the election was becoming a joke.
It's not known whether local media intends to cover the election fairly after their role in tinkering with the election outcome last time. For the past four years, criticism against mayor Hope has been curiously absent in the media, replaced by a record number of staged ribbon-cuttings and photo-ops, along with an obvious editorial slant that just stopped short of looking like open endorsement.
Normally, the media would be interested when anonymous cowards allegedly engage in extortion attempts against a potential mayoral candidate's family timed to intimidate them from running, particularly when it involves judicial proceedings, forged documents, and municipal information that passed through the mayor's office. Not in Chatham-Kent though, where political secrecy appears to be the predominant mode.
This website has conducted months of investigative journalism and promised to tell-all about what mayor Hope and his friends have been up to, so that voters can judge the facts accordingly. Explosive documents were obtained through Freedom of Information requests. Somebody doesn't like that, and local media won't touch it. Instead of using official channels to challenge facts posted elsewhere on this site and recorded in court documents, anonymous cowards have resorted to criminal means to intimidate the journalist.
Perhaps that explains the distortion in other local media. The news they missed could be big enough to draw official attention that's a little harder to intimidate.
Randy Hope Files for Re-election
MapleCityStar - September 02, 2010, 04:33 PM
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