Editorial

Crisis management

Originally published in the "2-26-09" issue.
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We thought it was a bad joke Monday morning. When we called Rich Ghilarducci over at the creamery to check it out, and were told he wasn’t in the office, we still thought we were wasting our time running down another Ferndale rumor. But then the fax machine rang and a news release like no other spit out.

How could this be? The hometown hero, the local boy who made good. The man who worked around the clock with an office overlooking the creamery’s waste pond. The man whose company vehicle was parked outside that unpretentious office every Sunday as he worked overtime ensuring that our valley’s way of life was intact.

We don’t know, and apparently creamery officials don’t either, what Ghilarducci meant by his cryptic statement that “there may be financial irregularities.” What we do know is that he abruptly walked out, fueling speculation and doomsday talk in a world already teetering on economic abyss. Please, let it be minor. Please, let there be no malicious intent. Say it ain’t so.

Meanwhile, we didn’t realize that the dairymen that make up the creamery board could move so fast. Transparency was not in the vocabulary of the creamery prior to Friday night. Understandably so. It is a private company. Now, however, everyone is talking and available. Communication is the name of the game. We’ve never seen a crisis situation handled so well. Those dairymen are running dairies while right smack in the middle of a tornado. We applaud them and creamery officials this week for their handling of the situation. They do not have answers yet, and we are counting on them being forthright and straight with all of us.

The silver lining this week? A focus on the agriculture community and how important it is to everything in our lives here in the valley. Who hasn’t stopped this week and thought about what effect the creamery’s demise would have on them?