Sling mud far from our pages

Every year in the Mat-Su Valley, residents participate in a variety of open seasons for hunting and fishing.

We also seem to have an annual local season for name-calling, finger-pointing and bullying, which closes this year at 7 p.m., April 26.

You guessed it. It’s MEA election season.

This year four people are in the running for election to the Matanuska Electric Association Board of Directors: Peter Burchell, Ray DePriest, Bill Folsom and Janet Kincaid. Kincaid and Burchell are incumbents. DePriest is a nominated candidate and Folsom is a past board member who returns to this year’s ballot by petition.

Some say the vitriol surrounding these annual elections is tied to the love-to-hate relationship some in the community have with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union. Others speculate this new round of ire is fueled by the loss of MEA’s campaign contributions to local legislators and other elected officials.

Either way, don’t count on using our newspaper or ink to feed this figurative fire.

We will gladly print your letters in support of candidates. We will not print letters or other opinion pieces that make allegations, bully or arbitrarily point fingers at other candidates.

Since the candidate list was finalized 10 days ago, we’ve received several letters and emails containing unsubstantiated allegations of theft, bribery, extramarital affairs and other legal and ethical wrongdoing.

We won’t be publishing any of them.

Why not?

First, there are legal issues, such as libel, connected to reprinting allegations we cannot substantiate. We simply do not have a fact-checking department we can deploy full-time to determine which wild allegations contain truth and which are purely lies.

Second, there’s the concern about what kind of community we want to be.

For our part, we are bone-weary of folks in other parts of the state and nation thinking of the Mat-Su Borough as a home to small, petty-minded people who bully and threaten when they don’t get their way.

As a community, we are better than that. We’ve seen you at your best — neighbor helping neighbor.

We won’t soil our hands by helping fling mud at the community we love, and we don’t think our neighbors should either.

As the community newspaper, part of our role is to set a standard and hold the line for the quality of discourse that will appear in our newspaper and on our website.

Whether we agree or agree to disagree, we insist the discourse remain civil.

As always, readers are welcome to send letters to the editor in support of their candidates to news@frontiersman.com or mail them to Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, P.O. Box 873509, Wasilla, AK 99687.

To the candidates, thank you for your willingness to give of your time in service to our community.

Good luck to all and may the best candidates win.