On April 5, a Memorandum of Understanding was voted on and signed between the Board of Supervisors of Cumberland County and Mason-Dixon Resorts Casino.
If you are interested in reading the Memorandum of Understanding, the April 5 special meeting minutes and Concerned Citizens written response submitted for the record at the April 27 township meeting, go to our Web site CCCTPA.org and click on Openness in Government. Concerned Citizens believe any citizen who is interested should know what is happening. To be fair, you can go to the Cumberland Township Web site and read the April 5 meeting minutes where you can click on the MOU, but you will not find our written statement for the record.
Agreements of any kind, though negotiated in good faith, have one major problem, interpretation. The parties who agree to them believe they have gotten the best deal for themselves. As the agreement is implemented, disagreements begin to occur over interpretation. For example, on page seven of the MOU, Items 11 and 12 gives the parties a lot of wiggle room. It raises concerns and could cause problems in the future. The shame of this agreement is how it was negotiated. This agreement was arranged and quietly managed so Mason-Dixon could meet their application deadline of April 7. The meeting was held April 5 at 3:30 p.m. on a Monday afternoon with no one there, because no one thought to look at the Gettysburg Times legal section on page D2 on April 1 which was Holy Thursday. People’s attention was focused on the upcoming Easter weekend, traveling to be with family, and worshiping. Our elected officials should have cared enough to have been more transparent about this MOU. Unfortunately, they were not. Today our wonderful community is split apart because of the casino, and the lack of transparency and democracy.
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Al Ferranto
Concerned Citizens of
Cumberland Township
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