RANDALL — It’s not the fact the town will get a new copier that is newsworthy. It’s why the town is getting one that raises eyebrows.
The board voted unanimously Thursday to lease a new color copier for an amount of money not significantly different from what it had been paying. While it does have some added capabilities compared to the copier it had been leasing, a need for those new features is not what prompted the town to get six different copier bids.
The town needed a different copier, supervisor Robert Gehring contended when he offered to explore other options, because the one they have was manufactured by Toshiba. As a matter of principal, Gehring disagrees with the lease or purchase of any product of Toshiba.
“There are questions of security involving this organization,” Gehring said when the product’s lease agreement came up for discussion last month. “This outfit should not have been allowed to continue to do business in this country.”
Gehring’s opinion stems from an incident in 1987, when Toshiba Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba, was accused of illegally selling machinery used to produce quiet submarine propellers to the Soviet Union, which was allegedly in violation of an international embargo.
The Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal also involved the Norwegian company Kongsberg Vaapenfabrik, strained relations with Japan, and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two senior executives.
Top government officials contended that providing technology to make the USSR’s submarines harder to detect created a significant threat to America’s security.
For Gehring, this is enough reason to boycott the use of any equipment made by Toshiba, which is also responsible for the invention of radar, microwave ovens and the technology used in MRI exams. It is why he voted against the copier lease under a different town administration and brought up the issue again.
This time he prevailed in his quest, though other officials cited the new copier’s functionality and price comparison as the reason behind their vote to lease a different copier.
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