CCA promotes dark skies and open space without sunshine or openness

The lawsuit filed to block the town’s purchase of a conservation easement on the old YMCA campground is just the latest in a string of failures by the CCA to live up to their rhetoric about open and transparent government.

By Linda Felaco

If you’ve read any of our coverage of Monday night’s Town Council meeting, you are no doubt aware that in anticipation of the throngs of concerned citizens expected to turn out for the public hearing on the proposed dark-sky ordinance, the meeting was held in the elementary school, which meant Clerkbase didn’t broadcast the meeting live. Video was recorded, but as of close of business on Tuesday had not been posted to Clerkbase.

What you are probably not aware of is that, ironically, this is Sunshine Week 2012 (March 11-17). (Hat tip to Jodi LaCroix.)

What is Sunshine Week? you ask. “Sunshine Week is a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information.”

Yup, that’s how Charlestown demonstrates its commitment to open and transparent government: by not broadcasting public meetings. 

You’d think that seeing as how Town Council President Tom Gentz and Vice President Dan Slattery campaigned on the issue of openness and transparency—indeed, both were endorsed by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, whose very raison d’être is “open, professional and ethical government that is transparent”—they’d make sure everyone who wanted to view the proceedings could. But apparently, transparency is one of those “Do as I say, not as I do” things.

After all, the CCA is notoriously secretive. They hold no announced meetings, they disclose no details other than those they are legally required to disclose, and their membership is closed. Let’s just say it’s pretty strange to see a political action committee like the CCA campaign for openness and transparency when they themselves serve as our secret, shadow government.

If matters of such widespread interest are being discussed that the audience can’t be accommodated in the council chambers, that’s all the more reason to broadcast a meeting live for those who might not be able to attend in person. Monday night’s council meeting was not the first to be held at the elementary school, nor will it be the last. Install an internet connection in the gym already.

Sure, it costs money. But not as much, I’d bet, as the cost of continually defending the town against lawsuits filed charging lack of transparency, such as the suit filed on March 9 to block the town’s purchase of a conservation easement on the old YMCA campground on grounds of multiple violations of the state’s open meeting laws. Not to mention the cost measured in terms of loss of trust in government and cynicism about the political process.

Indeed, transparency has been declining steadily since the Town Council was caught out trying to suppress the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee from presenting its views at the hearing on the wind energy ban in September. Since then, the council’s agenda-setting meetings have been conducted in “code” whereby councilors refer to topics by number rather than by name—and only the council members have the code-breaker sheet. Viewers don’t know what the numbers refer to until a day later when the agenda is posted on Clerkbase. It might as well be a secret meeting. What’s next? Conducting the meeting using semaphore flags? Smoke signals? Will council documents be printed with an Enigma machine?

Progressive Charlestown has been informed that draft agendas “should be” obtainable from the Town Clerk just prior to the agenda-setting meeting. In my opinion, it shouldn’t require a trip to Town Hall to be able to make sense of a meeting that is available for viewing on Clerkbase. But I suppose instructing the town clerk to post draft agendas on Clerkbase would defeat the whole purpose of conducting the meeting in code.

Though you’d think in consideration of their out-of-state membership, the CCA would be pushing for everything possible to be on Clerkbase. After all, it’s a bit of shlep to Town Hall from Stuart, Florida.

Moreover, not one of the meetings of the Charter Review Advisory Committee has been recorded, and minutes were not even posted until their absence was pointed out by Progressive Charlestown. And then the sketchy minutes that were finally posted read like kids’ letters home from summer camp. Not even the February 27 public hearing on the proposed charter revisions was recorded, even though all of the Citizens Forums—at which no actual town business is conducted and no votes are taken—have been on Clerkbase.

Then there was “Deputy Dan” Slattery’s aborted quest for “transparency” in the Chariho budget, conducted while simultaneously covering up documentation of his unauthorized investigation of the Notorious F.O.N. He even refused to allow fellow council member Greg Avedisian to view the files from his investigation upon request, although he had promised to do so.

Slattery also made a very puzzling and nontransparent request that in the supposed interest of transparency, the council vote at Monday night’s meeting on whether to place documents on Clerkbase that he had not provided to them and that they had never seen. Though in the interest of time—the meeting had already gone into extra innings—he deferred his four “War on Ninigret Park” agenda items to next month’s meeting.

Documents for the December 1 and January 5 Planning Commission meetings were not posted until after the fact, and no documents were posted for the various amendments to the dark-sky ordinance that were proposed prior to Monday night’s hearing. Then at the hearing, a chart detailing the changes and which types of properties they’d affect and when was distributed, but the document if anything only added to the confusion over what exactly the ordinance would require of people.

And as we all know, Planning Commissar Ruth Platner is the CCA webmistress. She seems to take far more care in posting the often banal and inane comments received by the CCA than in posting documents related to the work of the Planning Commission.

Perhaps it’s got something to do with the state where many Charlestown property owners, including key members of the CCA steering committee, live: Florida. According to the Sunshine Week website, “The Florida Society of Newspaper Editors launched Sunshine Sunday in 2002 in response to efforts by some Florida legislators to create scores of new exemptions to the state’s public records law.” Lack of transparency in the Sunshine State is the reason we have a Sunshine Week. Go figure.