VIRGINIA (GINNY) RAY occupies a distinctive position in Shelburne Falls civic life. She was a daily beat reporter for The Recorder from 1993 to 2005, covering these West County towns. She describes herself as editor and publisher of the Shelburne Falls & West County Independent since 2005. She has freelanced for The Commons in Brattleboro since 2021, and her investigative reporting there won first place in the New England Newspaper and Press Association's 2023 Better Newspaper Competition. In March 2021 she joined the Bridge of Flowers Committee, which lists her as its Recording Secretary and which she describes on her own professional profile this way: "I volunteer as secretary and assist with PR." She is also a member of the steering committee of the newly organized Shelburne Falls Alliance, and of its working group whose stated purpose is to "promote the region and manage its digital identity," which appears to include ShelburneFalls.com. These are not three unrelated volunteer activities. Together they place one person at the intersection of local journalism, the governance and public relations of the village's best-known attraction, and the way Shelburne Falls presents itself to residents, businesses and visitors.
That concentration of roles deserves public scrutiny, not because it establishes wrongdoing, but because it raises legitimate questions about transparency, representation and accountability. A journalist's professional authority rests in part on the public's ability to tell reporting apart from institutional advocacy, and that line is hardest to see when the journalist, by her own description, helps with an institution's PR. A civic committee's legitimacy rests on the public's ability to understand who makes decisions, how members are chosen, whose interests are represented and how those decisions can be challenged. When the same person works in both spheres, the need for clarity does not shrink. It grows. There is also a quieter cost. A journalist who properly recuses herself from covering a committee she serves on has taken herself off that beat, and in a village this size, with this few reporters, that can mean the beat goes uncovered.
Start with the committee itself. The Bridge of Flowers belongs to the Shelburne Falls Fire District. For decades it has been managed by a subcommittee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club, a private organization, and Ray's own profile lists her service with the "Shelburne Falls Women's Club Bridge of Flowers Committee." The club's page on the bridge's own website states that "membership is open to all women in the West County area and beyond." Every member on the committee's 2026 roster is a woman. A private club may set its membership however it likes. But the practical result is that a public crossing, owned by a public district, is governed by a body that half the public cannot join because of their sex. No man in Shelburne Falls can serve on the committee that runs a public bridge. There are no elections, no term limits, no open meetings and no published minutes a citizen can read. Whatever one thinks of the people involved, that is not modern stewardship of a public asset.
My concern is not theoretical. I made the River Bench and the Pothole Fountain for the bridge, and mason Paul Forth added the Black Stones memorial to my design. Later I had a long dispute with the committee's governance, and Ray's tenure on the committee, beginning in March 2021, spans nearly all of it. On February 10, 2026, The Recorder published my signed My Turn column on page A6, headlined "Time to modernize, democratize, Bridge of Flowers governance." It laid out the structural problem above. It pointed to the August 2025 ribbon-cutting, which followed a $3.2 million renovation and where, without a basic PA system, the speeches were drowned out by street noise. It pointed to the decision to use 100 percent organic matter as planting soil, a horticultural error now buried beneath the irrigation systems, where correcting it would mean a costly overhaul. It proposed a part-time professional steward, funded by grants, accountable to the Fire District and selected through an open process, along with open meetings, published minutes, term limits and clear ways for the public to take part. It also offered the Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis, an exact-scale steel trellis of the historic trolleys, planted with vines, grant-fundable and low-maintenance. The column ran in the paper where Ray reported for twelve years, and it was about the committee whose PR she says she helps with. I received one response. I received none from Ray, and to my knowledge none from the committee's leadership.
When the committee finally did speak, the subject was my trolley gate, not its governance. The renovation plan accounted for every plant on the bridge, but it made no provision for the art installed there, and the gate I had made and volunteered for the bridge ended up headed for a scrap yard. Elliston Bingham, the committee's own assistant gardener, rescued it during the renovation and kept it for two years without knowing it was mine. When he learned it was, he brought it straight back to me. I posted about getting it back and asked how it had ended up in a scrap yard in the first place. In October 2026, committee member Jorie MacLeod answered in that thread under the heading "Speaking for the Bridge of Flowers Committee." It was the first public word from the committee to me in six years. Facebook's edit history shows three versions written within nine minutes. The first said only that the committee "had been trying to find where the gate ended up" and "had wanted to return it to John, who had asked for its return." Six minutes later she added that she "personally always thought there would be some place in town for it to be displayed and feel that perhaps at the Trolley museum," and then: "With the feelings of rancor from John, perhaps the Trolley museum would be ideal." Three minutes after that she added that the committee "never approved of it going to a 'scrap yard' and did think it had ended up in someone's barn." I replied with the facts, much of what is set out here. She deleted her comment. An administrator of the Shelburne Falls Collective, a private Facebook group, wrote that the exchange might not be appropriate, and the next morning I was locked out of the group. The committee's first public statement in six years lasted about as long as it took me to answer it. So a committee that says it was searching for the gate never found it in the hands of its own assistant gardener, and its one public statement in six years, made in its own name, closed by suggesting that where a piece of the bridge's history belongs should depend on how a committee member reads the temperament of the man who made it. A historic artifact's place on a public bridge is a question for the Fire District that owns it, decided in public, on the merits of the object. It should not hinge on whether a committee member likes the man who made it.
That silence has a history, and the history runs through the same newsroom. In June 2020 The Recorder ran two stories about me built on an edited video and a Change.org petition. I declined to comment on the first. For the second, no one from the paper contacted me at all. The petition has since come down from Change.org, and The Recorder never reported that. On June 13, 2020, the paper told its readers: "I want to emphasize the mistakes a newspaper, including the Recorder, makes in its coverage are public mistakes. And we own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism." The editor at the time was Joan Livingston, who led The Recorder from March 2019 until January 2022 and lives on the Buckland side of Shelburne Falls. She now serves on the Buckland Selectboard. I sent the paper roughly ten letters, with evidence, asking for that promised correction. None was ever printed. So the paper Ray reported for, under an editor who lives in this village, published the first account of me and never corrected it. Ray, who sits on the committee at the center of that account, has never asked a public question about it.
I know something of how the committee handled me because one of its members told me. Ann Lofquist, who sits on the Bridge of Flowers Committee, had a studio about ninety feet from mine at the Mill, where I worked from late 2020 until late 2025, and for a time we were friends. In 2021 she told me plainly that the committee had thrown me under the bus. She also told me that Kay Berenson, publisher of The Recorder from 1996 to 2009, a former president of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association and a Shelburne Falls resident, led the Zoom meetings about me. Berenson describes herself as an advocate for "the public's right to information about government actions." Months later I stopped speaking with Lofquist, for my own reasons. Nothing in that falling-out changes what she said, or the fact that she said it as a friend. No one on the committee has said anything to me since that would contradict it. Taken together, the pattern is hard to miss. A former publisher of The Recorder led the meetings about me. The Recorder's editor ran the stories and never corrected them. A former Recorder reporter took a seat on the committee and helps with its PR. No single person built that wall. It is what happens when a small newsroom and a small set of civic bodies draw on the same few people.
Ray now sits on the steering committee of an organization presenting itself as a guide to the village's economic and cultural future. The Alliance describes its responsibilities broadly: setting priorities for development and growth, advising on local initiatives, coordinating with nonprofits, business owners and residents, gathering community input, monitoring progress and guiding the regional coordinator position. These are consequential functions, even though the Alliance is not an elected municipal body. ShelburneFalls.com, whose working group Ray serves on, carries an air of civic centrality, and a visitor could reasonably take it for the village's principal front door. The site describes itself as a community and tourism platform serving West County, not an official municipal website. That distinction should be clear to the public, and so should the identities and affiliations of the people shaping its content and priorities.
I am not alleging that Ray's journalism is compromised, that her participation proves a conflict of interest, or that the Alliance exists for anyone's private enrichment. Those are separate claims that would need separate evidence. I am asking why a person with three decades of journalistic standing, a role in the governance and public relations of a major local attraction, and a hand in shaping the village's public identity should be treated as an uncomplicated source of independent local authority, particularly when a substantive public challenge to one of the institutions she serves has gone unanswered for its entire length. Every year of the committee's silence toward me has been a year with a working journalist in the room.
The question is bigger than Virginia Ray. Shelburne Falls repeatedly presents itself through a small network of committees, nonprofits, business interests, cultural institutions and familiar public voices, several of them shaped by the same newspaper. Many of the people involved may be hardworking volunteers acting in good faith. That does not settle the structural question. Who holds these institutions accountable when their authority overlaps, when public proposals get no meaningful response, when a promised correction never comes, when the first word in six years is a remark about the maker's temperament, and when the same network both defines the public narrative and controls how the village is promoted? The Shelburne Falls Alliance is now asking residents and businesses to contribute monthly to its work. Before the public is asked to finance another effort to steer the village's future, it is reasonable to ask for transparent governance, clear lines of responsibility, demonstrable results and real ways for people outside the existing network, including the half of the public barred from the bridge committee, to take part. Ray's overlapping roles make her a particularly relevant person through whom to examine those questions. They do not make her guilty of anything. They make transparency essential.