Tempers flared at Tuesday night’s Mathews County Board of Supervisors meeting, with supervisor Melissa Mason taking exception to her colleague Mike Walls’s request that she end a presentation she was making.

Supervisors also voted to move ahead with a public hearing at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at Mathews High School on the proposal to deed the county’s Confederate monument, which is located on the court green in front of the old courthouse. The board approved setting the hearing by a 4-1 vote, with Mason dissenting.

Confrontation

Mason’s slide presentation, with a voiceover by her, was a plea for unity and healing in the Mathews community after months of division over the issue of the Confederate monument.

Included in the board packet and available online, the presentation had 11 slides and had arrived at slide seven when Walls asked chairman Paul Hudgins to end it. Referring to papers he had in his hand, he said that, according to the board’s bylaws, supervisors have 10...