It does not matter if a public official’s incident is a fender bender or a four-car collision.
What can make it a big deal is how it is handled. Just like with information requests and properly conducted meetings, the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong is doing it openly.
That’s what makes a December crash in Murrysville an issue.
On Friday, Westmoreland County District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli called her Dec. 18 incident minor.
The crash happened after 3:30 a.m. Local roads were covered in snow or sleet. Ziccarelli said she couldn’t stop at a stop sign because of the conditions on Cherry Drive, where she ended up running over a tree, heading into a private drive and crashing into a parked car.
It was major enough for the airbags to deploy. It was major enough to require towing of the government-owned SUV.
And yet nothing was said about the incident on Dec. 19 when the courthouse opened and everyone was back at work. It took almost three weeks for a statement to be made about a crash involving an elected official and government property.
Why? It isn’t because no one was available to make a statement. In addition to Ziccarelli herself, there was her official spokesperson, Melanie Gillespie Jones, who started work Nov. 14. The commissioners could have commented or designated solicitor Melissa Guiddy, who frequently acts as the county’s mouthpiece.
The way to keep a minor incident minor is to make sure people see that it is the simple skid that could happen to anyone. The way to make it a big deal is to not talk about it at all.
After all, if your kid skidded on a snowy day at 3:30 a.m., running over a tree and hitting another car, you wouldn’t accept “minor” as the end of the conversation — especially 20 days later. You would want all of the information laid out as soon as possible so you could make your own decisions about the responsible use of your property.
Ziccarelli is answerable for the use of county property the same way.
