A disturbing development

We take thousands of photos and attend many local meetings and events each year, all without needing the aid of local police.

But that changed Thursday morning.

A resident at Wasilla Senior Center called 911 on behalf of Managing Editor Heather A. Resz after the center’s executive director, Sondra Kaplan, mildly injured her in an attempt to block the editor from taking photos at a regular Wasilla Area Seniors Inc. board meeting.

A Wasilla police officer responded and took statements from Kaplan and Resz. Resz declined to press charges for assault. Kaplan told the officer the Frontiersman’s staff — Resz and reporter K.T. McKee — was trespassing and the officer asked them to leave.

We thought we’d been invited to cover a public meeting, like the Mat-Su Borough Assembly, school board or a Matanuska Electric Association meeting.

Not so, the police officer said.

The Wasilla Senior Center is on private property, although it receives state and federal funds. And as such, the officer said, management has discretion to eject anyone from the property without needing a reason.

So we left.

In the mean time, some at WASI continue to fault the Frontiersman for reporting on the turmoil there, saying it hampers — most recently in a March 6 letter — the nonprofit’s ability to fund-raise.

Wasilla City Councilwoman Colleen Sullivan-Leonard has sponsored an agenda item for the council’s Monday meeting that asks council members to approve $34,800 for the nonprofit’s nutrition program. The council rejected a similar request from the center in December 2010.

At that time, council members Dianne Woodruff, Taffina Katkus and Steve Menard voted against the request saying that because they’d received too many calls and e-mails from seniors about issues related to the senior center and weren’t getting all their questions answered by the WASI board or executive staff, they could not justify the expenditure.

We see genuine efforts on the part of WASI board members to address concerns raised by those who depend on and use the senior center. Thank you.

We will continue to report this story. Though it won’t be McKee or Resz at the senior center, Kaplan said Thursday that other Frontiersman staff may come on senior center property.

What does it mean when Kaplan says that our staff can cover WASI meetings?

Does it mean we can send a reporter, but not a photographer? Does it mean our reporter can stay only if he or she doesn’t make Kaplan nervous? What if the reporter simply writes an objective account of the meeting but Kaplan just doesn’t like it? Will our efforts to report on an important segment of our community — our seniors — eventually make us all outlaws with WASI if Kaplan doesn’t personally approve of the coverage?

These aren’t questions we can answer. We were told the senior center is private property and may toss out every third person who tries to attend the organization’s meetings, if it so chooses.

Is Thursday’s altercation the act of an organization that can be trusted to use our public dollars as intended? Is there sufficient accountability and transparency to ever know how any public money they might receive would be spent?

The board seems staffed with well-intended Wasilla residents. We hope they will take back the reins of WASI and end the dysfunctional discourse.