As if they knew this article was coming, the CCA ran a piece this morning noting a positive mention in Travel and Leisure magazine about the Frosty Drew Observatory in Ninigret Park. My congratulations to Frosty Drew but I remain unconvinced this will have any effect on Charlestown's tourism economy.
Look, I’ve often said I love our dark sky – I wanted to be
an astronomer when I was a kid. Relative to Providence, our sky is wonderful.
But I’ve travelled enough to know that the CCA’s fetish for dark skies only
means they’ve never seen the sky over Montana. Or New Mexico. Or the Rockies. Or Nebraska. Or even New Hampshire and Vermont. Given the multitude of places near and far
with darker skies than ours, it’s silly to think our small patch of night sky
will make us a tourist mecca.
Unless the CCA manages to black out South Kingstown,
Narragansett and Westerly and bans cars from travelling at night with lights
on, Charlestown will never be the black hole tourist haven the CCA wants it to
be. Besides, given how our population during the summer swells from 8,000 to
30,000, do we really need more tourists?
If the CCA wants to run on the dark sky issue again in the upcoming
special election, fine.
The frenzy to buy more open space
The CCA has also ventured opinions about how the CRU is managing the budget and dealing with the balance left in the town’s open space bonding authority.
There’s a tie-in between the CCA’s odd and ultimately
dysfunctional management of town finances and their dark sky fetish since it
all seems centered on CCA founder and de facto leader Ruth Platner’s fixation
on the need to endlessly expand town-owned open space.
According to maps in Platner’s own Comprehensive Plan,
more than 60% of Charlestown’s land mass is already protected from development. Platner’s iron-fisted control of the Charlestown Planning Commission has made
new housing construction as difficult as possible even under new state
legislation to alleviate the affordable housing crisis.
In 2015, Platner championed a $2 million bond that Platner
used as collateral to acquire land, usually at inflated prices, to set aside as
open space.
Contrary to Platner’s claim that she has the voters’ mandate, the
2015 bond issue passed by only 11 votes. That’s a margin of less than 1%.
Despite the bond authority, the actual purchases of land –
over a million dollars’ worth - were made through the use of taxpayer money
from the town’s General Fund with some state taxpayer funding. That doesn’t
count the $2.14
million that came out of 2004 bonds to buy the moraine property that was
proposed as the site of the Whalerock wind turbines.
We’ve been paying cash rather than issue the low-interest
municipal bonds authorized in the 2015 referendum. This fits the CCA’s peculiar
notion that the town should generally pay in cash for capital investments
rather than issue bonds like normal municipalities.
Remember, we all avail ourselves of low-interest
financing such as mortgages and car loans to make major capital investments.
For normal people, it makes more sense to use credit than saving for years to be able to pay cash for a house or a car or stove.
These days, you only see major cash transactions when money laundering is involved or purchases by elderly folks who grew up
during the Great Depression. I don’t propose a spend-and-borrow spree but do
suggest we should act like a normal municipality.
The result of the CCA credit-phobia was the creation of
various accounts throughout the Charlestown budget to cover various
contingencies. The CCA also increased property taxes nearly every year during
its reign to pump up the town’s Uncommitted Fund Balance.
They were reluctant to spend any of that money except, of
course, on Platner’s shady
land deals.
The Saw Mill Pond scam
Ruth
Platner complained bitterly after one such deal fell through. She blames CRU Council
members for blocking the 2022 Saw Mill Pond deal even though it was one of
the CCA Council members who caused the deal to fail. It’s a case worth a closer look
especially since it’s a key Platner bullet point in her case against Charlestown Residents United.
This deal began in 2021 with a mysterious, unprecedented
motion by then CCA Council rep Bonnita Van Slyke to authorize Charlestown to
pursue DEM funding for a piece of property. She
wanted the location, name of the owner and even the proposed sale price kept
secret from the public. The CCA majority on the Council naturally approved
this motion.
In early 2022, DEM approved a $400,000 50% matching grant. That
meant the deal price was going to be at least $800,000. We
also found out that the piece of property was ALREADY designated as open
space and had been getting tax breaks for years under the Farm, Forest and Open
Space program. The assessed value of this property was $312,800.
CRU Council members Deb Carney and the late Grace Klinger pushed
for an honest appraisal before buying land for more than double the
assessed value since it was already open space. The 3-2 CCA majority usually
overrode such objections, but not this time.
Former CCA Council member Cody Clarkin (←left) recused himself
because his mom was an abutter. Without his vote, the deal died on a 2-2 tie vote.
So ended the
CCA Council majority’s last shady land deal before voters booted them out of power
later that year.
How much is enough?
Generally, the CCA believes you can’t have too much money
salted away. The CCA still takes that position, criticizing
the CRU-led Town Council for failing to continue to build up the fund balance.
For its part, the CRU has held that raising taxes just to salt away cash to never
use it except in dire emergencies – or to satisfy Ruth Platner’s land lust - is
poor money management.
If they were still controlling Charlestown, the CCA would probably put all of the town's revenue into mayonnaise jars buried in former Budget Commission Chair Richard Sartor's back yard.
It's a fair question to ask how much the town needs to save
especially since the Trump regime has made it clear states and localities are
on their own in local emergencies. We already have enough uncommitted cash to
run the town for a year with no outside help. But the CCA wants to add more plus
some unspecified amount for other catastrophes that might occur over a 10 year
period.
Charlestown is lucky to have so much cash that we can even
have this conversation, but at what point does it become ridiculous to pay more
taxes to soothe the CCA’s anxieties?
The CCA’s antiquated beliefs in squirreling away cash
ultimately bit them in the ass. Having so many excess fund accounts led to
sloppy money management that culminated in the infamous 2022 “$3
million oopsie.” Town auditors noticed $3 million was missing, later found
to have been “misallocated” for two years to a fund where it didn’t belong.
Rather than learn the Watergate lesson that it’s the
cover-up that gets you, the CCA tried to lie, deny and deflect their way out of
trouble. However, it cost the CCA the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Getting our money back
The
CCA has pitched a fit over a proposal from Council President Deb Carney to
actually issue the $2 million in open space bonds and use half of it to
reimburse the town’s General Fund for the money the CCA spent to buy land for
Platner.
Platner says this would violate the will of the 50.9% of the
voters who ok’d the 2015 bond issue. Except, as Platner knows, the ballot
question read:
“Shall the Town of Charlestown finance the acquisition,
preservation or protection of open space or any interest therein alone or in
conjunction with federal agencies, state agencies, land conservancies, land
trusts or preservation organizations for preservation and approve the
issuance of bonds and notes therefor in an amount not to exceed $2,000,000?”
The CCA used General Fund money to buy the land, not bond money. Deb
Carney’s proposal to use the bond authority to put money back into the General
Fund keeps faith with the voters’ intention to issue bonds for open space buys.
The key word is “therefor” which means “for that object
or purpose.” Voters approved $2 million in bonds to “finance the
acquisition…of open space…” not to set up an untouchable cash kitty. Paying for land deals from the General Fund and then failing to use bonding authority to put the money back was not what voters approved in 2015.
I hope Platner and the CCA test their self-serving interpretation
of the 2015 bond referendum with today’s voters in the upcoming special election. I also hope Charlestown voters will pay attention and come out to vote. Our town budget only drew 160 voters out of 6,895 active voters on the rolls.
We’ll see how close I’ve come to forecasting how the CCA
will approach the upcoming December 2 Special Election. In my opinion, the main issue
remains the same as it was for the last two General Elections: who can you
trust to manage YOUR money?
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