Letters

Gail Lombardi [“Value of Seniors,” Letters, August 1], a member of the board of directors of the Hampton Bays Civic Association, and Marion Boden [“Stay Vigilant,” Letters, August 1], its vice president, reveal in their latest contributions to these pages that there is no low to which they won’t stoop to advance their organization’s unpopular opposition to Hampton Bays downtown redevelopment.

In my recent letter [“Parade of Horribles,” Letters, July 25], I called Lombardi out for her mendacious submission the week prior [“Opinion, Not Fact,” Letters, July 18], which omitted crucial information that a reader would need to put her specious claims in context, and condemned her for fear-mongering “people away from progress by reference to a parade of horribles.”

Unable to rebut anything of substance in my letter, Lombardi took two sentences from it and spun a lie.

Referring to the Hampton Bays Civic Association, I stated, “Opposition to Hampton Bays revitalization has been exclusively seated in a civic association with an essentially white, senior citizen membership. ... While deserving to be heard, their opinions are not representative of Hampton Bays’ diverse population.”

Lombardi falsely accused me of age discrimination in a beside-the-point fifth grade essay replete with the obligatory introductory definition of “ageism.” Nothing that I wrote is discriminatory. Nor have I displayed prejudice against or disparaged senior citizens, as accused.

On the contrary, I accurately described the membership of the organization at the oppositional epicenter of the Hampton Bays downtown redevelopment debate, acknowledged the importance of their voice as we contemplate the future of our hamlet, all the while recognizing that their opinions are not representative of the diverse Hampton Bays community and cannot arrogate the conversation. Lombardi, wielding a Google search engine law degree, should spend some time researching defamation.

Boden should do the same. Twisting my mention of a “parade of horribles” into a fabricated slur, Boden stated, in defense of Lombardi, that “John Leonard, the head of the newly formed Hampton Bays Alliance, now calls her one of the ‘horribles.’”

At the end of the day, all that we can expect from the Hampton Bays Civic Association is a shameless lack of integrity, and anyone in favor of redevelopment will find themselves in the cross-hairs. Since forming the Hampton Bays Alliance, I have been threatened and accused of all manner of indiscretion by the Civic’s leadership in hopes that I and others like me will retreat, mute, acquiesce. Everything else having failed, they now resort to telling verifiable lies in a desperate attempt to discredit the Alliance and its mission.

But we will never let that happen. We will stay vigilant, Marion, just not in any way you ever imagined.

John J. Leonard

President

Hampton Bays Alliance