At April's Town Meeting, we were asked to approve the contract with the police (patrolman's) union. Town Meeting was told, via a handout and a police-officer speaker, that the police have been working without a contract for several years, that the payscale for Acton's officers was falling behind other towns, and that Town Meeting needed to approve several contracts, some retroactively, based on the awarding of an arbitration award.

What was not made clear was that the people who fought for taxpayers--the Board of Selectmen and the Town Manager--whose job it is to control these rising costs, were prohibited from speaking against the arbitration award by state law....

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