Burlington Officials Plea To Residents: Stop The Facebook Gossip

BURLINGTON, MA — Much of the time allotted for the Department of Public Works director to update the Board of Selectmen on the E. coli situation in a recent meeting was filled with members griping about some of the online discourse during the short-lived crisis.

DPW Director John Sanchez appeared before the board on June 28 to tell them the outside investigation into the positive E. coli test results from earlier in the month is ongoing and should be wrapped up in a couple of weeks. There was no other new information to share.

Selectmen Joseph Morandi and James Tigges thanked Sanchez and his department for their work before laying out some grievances against the Facebook community.

"If the residents are listening, please be a little bit nicer until you get all the facts," Morandi said. "Some of the stuff that was said was totally uncalled for ... I will never respond to a Facebook post that people put out there, but please, at least get your facts out straight, because this man [Sanchez] sitting here and his staff did an outstanding job to get this situation resolved."

In particular, a rumor that spread about E. coli cases being connected to a local gym riled officials. That issue was investigated and found to be false but took town resources to do so.

"Please if you're going to discuss this, make it factual and no innuendos," Tigges said. "Because it's tough enough to go through something like this, and then when you have all these little tangents thrown at you it just makes it that much more difficult to address and try to resolve when you get distracted."

Officials also touched on the leaf pickup delay residents may be experiencing. Republic, Burlington's third-party contractor, is having trouble staffing its trucks. And the problem is that simple.

"Until we get drivers we're kind of stuck," Morandi said. "You're leaf bags might be out there for a week or two weeks."

Republic is offering signing and referral bonuses to get drivers. But for now, officials are asking for patience.

Mike Carraggi can be reached at mike.carraggi@patch.com. Follow him on Twitter @PatchCarraggi. Subscribe to Burlington Patch for free local news and alerts and like us on Facebook.