Another Sudden Resignation, Standing up to Trolls and the Value of Anonymous Sources
Friday came with the announcement of another sudden resignation by Ward 3’s Oscar Delgado, in that seat since 2012, deciding to focus more on his well paid Community Health Alliance CEO position (nearly $200,000 in the latest publicly available documents), effective in just a week.
Will it be another lame selection process to replace him, as was the case for Ward 5 and Neoma Jardon’s seat, and initially with Devon Reese for the at-large seat? The democratic voting option is there to fill these resignations, but our city council always has excuses to go the selection route instead.
Speaking of Reese, members of a recent panel Our Town Reno took part in are standing up to comments he made on social media attacking panelists for not reacting to closing words by a community member at the very end of the event at the Radical Cat. Reese didn’t even attend the event, and doesn’t know many of us did speak about it immediately after when the published recording shut off. Plus he completely mischaracterized what was said anyway. Many are now blocking him from different sites. Negative trolling takes a toll.
Speaking of trolls, we received threatening messages from a relative of Wandering Wyld CEO Rachel Macintyre. Let’s make it clear here: this will not intimidate us. Our story based on anonymous sourcing about concerns about preparations for the Reno Public Market was immediately followed by people commenting on our Instagram on the record.
As we’ve said before, part of our reporting objectives is to issue community alerts. These are usually are most widely read based on the analytics we receive from Meta and Google. We received multiple messages concerning Wandering Wyld before pursuing the story which included a long rebuttal. Following publication, we received a dozen more, with more concerns, and other groups, including Wells Ave. Latino business owners indicating they feel shunned as well.
From our initial interaction we’ve also always said we’d be open to have a follow up podcast recording with Macintyre, so indications from her on her public social media that we refused to meet in person are not reflected by our written messages. Our time is precious. If we meet with someone it’s for the purposes of reporting and informational content for our channels.
New concerns beyond Wandering Wyld at the Reno Public Market were brought up in some of the new messages, such as whether the food court will be serving everything in single use disposables and whether there will be staffing issues with their long and late hours of operation. The opening is already being pushed back, so let’s wait and see how this all turns out. Time has a way.
More Reporting Highlights This Week
We also reported on social media (including above) about local union workers calling for rent stabilization measures as part of their get out the vote efforts for the 2022 midterms.
We had Spanish language coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month events on our TikTok.
We also reported about a former prison doctor still fighting for the locally incarcerated.