GroenLinks alderman Groot Wassink: ‘I didn’t lie’ | Inland

The driver was under fire after app traffic with his officials was put on the street via a Wob request from this newspaper. Groot Wassink initially did not respond last summer to press questions about a report in which victims of anti-gay violence said that their attackers are often Dutch with a non-Western background. Groot Wassink let his spokesperson communicate that he was on vacation – he said he was ‘more than 16,000 kilometers away in Croatia’ – and was also ‘hard to reach’.

But the app traffic released showed the opposite: nothing seemed wrong with Groot Wassink’s mobile phone. There was plenty of contact with the civil servants. Still, Groot Wassink denied on Wednesday that there was a lie. The fact that there was app contact ‘didn’t mean that the alderman was available all day’, it sounded. “I did other things with my family that whole day,” said Groot Wassink, who initially agreed with his spokesperson to ‘hold off questions’, according to the Wob documents. Although at the end of the debate, the director still held his own hand. “Had I known it would lead to this, I might have done it differently.”

‘Reheated mash’

The VVD, which had requested the emergency debate because they thought that Groot Wassink had ‘failed appearances’ and had deliberately thrown the report over the fence in a news-deep period, received the full blow of the self-proclaimed diversity champions D66 and GL during a bizarre display. The parties spoke – in an apparently coordinated attack – about ‘heated up mash’ in an ostentatious attempt to keep Groot Wassink out of the wind. With success: the opposition parties cut their speaking time, after which the alderman was given a safe-conduct.

VVD councilor Martens thought that was ‘incredibly strange’. “I understand that just before the elections, GL does not dare to ask the alderman the questions itself. I had hoped that in the context of a new management culture we could have asked the same questions.” Martens: „Today a number of parties seemed to have forgotten that it is my, theirs, our task to check the alderman. When we receive new information in which we read that the alderman did not want to respond to press questions, we have the right to want to discuss this. That the two largest coalition parties GL and D66 virtually block a decent debate by literally posing for the alderman is a low point.”

astonishment

The Party for the Animals and JA21 also looked with astonishment at the actions of the coalition parties that were busy putting up smoke screens throughout the debate. “A councilor is destroying the transparent administrative culture that he says he promotes. Makes a clusterfuck of a very sensitive report on a vulnerable group. Makes an administrative mud figure”, says JA21 party chairman Annabel Nanninga. “And D66 and GL come and say that ‘we don’t have to talk about this.’ It’s okay folks, just keep walking.”

—