My op-ed in today's YDN, responding to the Yale - New Haven Hospital's media spin on critics of its development strategy, is on-line here: Two weeks ago, feeling the heat from mobilization by community members, New Haven's City Plan Commission denied a rubber stamp to a Yale-New Haven Hospital project for the first time in recent memory. Sharing his view of hospital critics who had turned out with concerns about the its development program, hospital spokesman Vin Petrini told this newspaper in a Sept. 23 article that they "can't have it both ways. Either they support the cancer center, or they don't." Petrini's is a clever rhetorical trick and a shameful political smear: Paint whoever stalls your chosen development approach as soft on cancer. The hospital owes all of us – most of all, those neighbors whose quality of life is affected by every hospital expansion – more candor and less bluster. The hospital's concerned neighbors, who want to see cancer treated as much as anyone, deserve an honest dialogue about the impact of the hospital's plans on their access to jobs, housing and health care.