If you want to watch government dysfunction at its best, I might direct your attention to the YouTube recording of the Groton Town Council meeting from April 5, when civil decorum breaks down over appointments to a new committee meant to improve community relations with police.

The makeup of the committee, which was created out of the angst from 2020's long summer of Black Lives Matter protests in Groton and the rest of the country, is one of the latest flash points in a Groton council deeply divided, largely pitting factions of the town's fractured Democratic Party against one another.

What is especially disconcerting in this instance is that the bickering was over appointments to a committee meant to help the community and police work through tensions exposed in the Black Lives Matter summer.

Watching the video from April 5, I had to wince at times at the rudeness exhibited by police-endorsed Councilor Rachel Franco toward two councilors of color, Aundré Bumgardner and Portia Bordelon, both top vote-getters in the last election, as they tried unsuccessfully to beat back an attempt by a slim majority of councilors, including Franco, to overturn the nominations to the policing committee made by the council's own nominating committee.

Even more troubling, though, was that the maneuvering to keep two applicants off the new police committee, after they were put up by the Personnel and Appointments Committee, was apparently in sympathy to police objections to their serving.

Indeed, Town Manager John Burt is on record in emails conveying objections by the chief of police.

In one email that is especially shocking to me, the town manager suggested he would withhold police participation on the police committee.

In a March 3 email to members of the council's Personnel and Appointments Committee, as they planned to vote, Burt wrote: "My fear is that we will get an unreasonable membership. If we form a contentious group, I wouldn't require police participation until the issue was corrected."

Wow. If Groton were a military-style organization, like the police, that would be insubordination.

Here you have elected representatives of the community developing a new police–community relations committee, born from a summer of unrest over police violence toward Black people, and the town manager says he's going to withhold support if he doesn't like members who are nominated to serve.

Even worse, he admits he is doing the bidding of the police chief in vetting committee membership.

When I asked him about this in an email, he said, quoting the charter, that participation of town staff on committees must be approved by the town manager.

He wrote: "'The Council and its members shall deal officially with the town staff solely through the Town Manager'. That has been further clarified over the years through legal opinions to mean, among other things, participation of any town staff in Committees must be approved by the Town Manager, and I will take all relevant factors into consideration when deciding on approval."

Well, yes of course, he has authority over staff, including police.

But he does not have authority over membership of volunteer committees of citizens created by the people's elected representatives.

And threatening to use his authority over police to withdraw their participation on a committee meant to improve police and community relations, just because he or the police chief don't like the proposed membership, is extraordinary and a pointed insult to those voters who elected the members of the nominating committee.

No one elected the town manager.

The faction of the Groton Democrats that has wholeheartedly supported the town manager, giving him a contract extension after his staff badly bungled the awarding of the development agreement for the Mystic Oral School, giving it to someone guilty of bribing public officials, was diminished in the last election. But they still seem to have a voting majority.

I think the town probably needs one more election to finally right the ship and make government more accountable to the electorate.

Meanwhile, the members of the Personnel and Appointments Committee have asked Town Clerk Betsy Moukawsher to pursue an inquiry about the way in which the vote to set aside its recommendations for the new police committee was conducted. They say it was an illegal vote.

Stay tuned.

The fight over membership of the new police committee promises to be just one more flash point for a Town Council that can't seem to get along and one on which a slight majority doesn't seem to have a lot of respect for the will of voters.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com