Yes, I'm back from a wee vacation in Maine, and I have a few Medford/DNC news articles to report.  First, my letter to the Medford Transcript was printed in its entirety in this week's edition (8/5/2004), although they didn't print my email or web site address.  They appear to only print name, street address and city, so I'm not sure why putting email or web site in there is any big deal.

 

Second, the front page article in the very same edition was, "City Officials call Democratic Convention 'a let down'."  The gist of the article is that the police and hospital were prepared for a big mess, but it was actually lighter than normal duty.  I think the quote is probably the Transcript's - no one is actually quoted that way, and when you think about it, there are a lot of silly interpretations of that comment.

 

Was the DNC itself a let-down?  Clearly not, the impact on Medford was just much different than anticipated.

 

Was it a let-down because there weren't any traffic problems or explosions?  Um, clearly not again, in fact, I think that's the sign of a good job.

 

The city officials are presented well in the article, but once again I find myself second-guessing the Transcript.  At any rate, my letter made it in print, so I've made my point.

 

OK, next update.  I've gotten some increased visibility because of this issue.  Links to my site have been published on a number of other sites, and so my site traffic is increasing.  It's nice to know there are people out there watching and reading.  Thanks!

Back in the spring as the DNC drew closer, we were inundated with messages about how bad the traffic would be, and advised to stay out of work or take a vacation during this time.  At the same time, the benefits to the Boston area for hosting the convention were trumpeted – the increase in business, national exposure, and so forth.  The real impact on Medford was that neither of these scenarios turned out to be true for the vast majority of us.

 

First, we all had to determine if we would (or could) make arrangements to get out of town.  It’s pretty rare to have to make such an arbitrary decision to leave, but a lot of people thought about it.  Many people did leave, or at least they didn’t drive around.  The benefits of this were significant.  Sure, the traffic was good.  More importantly, it became easier to identify suspicious people, and there were more police around to respond to that and other situations.  In my mind, Medford residents should be proud of themselves for respecting the inconvenient needs of the events' security plan because it really paid off.

 

But there was a negative impact as well.  With car and foot traffic down from normal, a lot of small businesses had a bad week.  That can really hurt a small business, especially when we all expected them to have a really good week.  So if you fall in that category, thanks for hanging in there – things are getting back to normal.

 

Finally, try to forget about your politics for a moment, and consider this: we, as a community, were handed one of few high security areas outside the convention itself, and it was a great success.