Ruth Platner leaves fingerprints

Platner blows her cover in attack on the Water Resources Board

By Will Collette

Charlestown Planning Commissar Ruth Platner has been caught meddling, without authority, in a private land sale seeking to block a transaction that would set aside more open space to protect Charlestown's water resources. Platner rarely leaves fingerprints, but this time she did.

One of the new Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) issues for this election year is the need for Charlestown to gird itself against nefarious attacks from the evil government of the state of Rhode Island. For years, Charlestown has tried to have itself placed above state law on such diverse matters as mandatory recycling, affordable housing and open government.

But over the past few months, the CCA Party has taken their deepest plunge yet into their fantasies of Charlestown exceptionalism. It has to do with open space and protecting drinking water, issues that are normally like apple pie and the flag in Charlestown and with the CCA.

However, Platner along with the three CCA Party boys who constitute the majority on the Town Council have gone nuts over the private purchase deal made by the RI Water Resources Board (WRB) and the family of Frank Glista, to purchase several undeveloped lots south of Old Post Road. 

The Water Resources Board intends to set those lots aside as open space to protect the clean, abundant groundwater beneath for future use when we need it.

So what’s wrong with this? According to Platner, the three CCA Council boys and now new Zoning Board member Mike Chambers, lots.

First, they believe – with no foundation in law – that the Town Council (meaning the CCA) was required to be given advance notice about this private land sale and the right to approve or reject it.

This is what Platner, Gentz and the other CCAholes would
have you believe will be built....

Second, they believe, with absolutely no foundation in fact, that the state plans to build a giant pumping station, water tower and pipeline system that will suck Charlestown’s aquifer dry so the water can be shipped to Providence.

Multiple sources say that Town Council Boss Tom Gentz has been spreading this false and salacious story as he rambles through town campaigning for re-election.

Third, they are convinced, with absolutely nothing to back it up, that the WRB land purchase will automatically lead to a public water system run by the state and that will lead to dense shoreline development, even though Charlestown already has three public water systems without those feared results. 

Two of them are the fake Fire Districts discussed in detail here. Not coincidentally, these neighborhoods – Quonnie and Shady Harbor - are also CCA Party strongholds, but I’m sure politics was the last thing on Platner’s mind when she concocted this phony issue.

...Except it's a lie. The Water Resources Board will leave the land as it is
until Charlestown says otherwise (click to enlarge this Google Earth
screen shot)

Aside from holding an auto-de-fe style Planning Commission meeting on the subject, Planning Commissar Ruth Platner has largely let useful idiots like Boss Gentz, Chambers, George Tremblay - take the crazier, more radical public positions against the Water Resources Board’s acquisition of the Glista land.

However, when Platner wrote to the state Department of Administration, she attempted to play a game I had heard she likes to play – but had never had concrete evidence. Writing as a private citizen, but making it perfectly clear that as Charlestown Planning Commissar, she is also one of Charlestown’s grand high poobahs, Platner unleased an eight-page assault on the acquisition.

Normally, it would be very hard for me, or any other area journalist, to uncover that letter. However, the addressees at the state Department of Administration forwarded Platner’s letter to WRB Director Ken Burke and Burke sent it, plus a WTF Inquiry to Charlestown Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz.

Since I have a standing request on file under the Access to Public Records Act (APRA) for records on this subject, Stankiewicz was obliged to release the letter to me. Click here to read Platner’s letter and Stankiewicz’s e-mail exchange with Ken Burke at the WRB.

Stankiewicz asserts in his e-mail that Platner’s letter (which was cc’d to several top RI Department of Administration officials) was done on her own hook, not on behalf of the town, even though Platner structured the letter to try to have it both ways.

If you want to read the real CCA Party platform, look no
further.

In her usual fashion, Platner dresses up her nonsense in long and technical language, high on umbrage over this assault on Charlestown’s prerogatives, but fundamentally flawed in its assumptions. Her scientific and legal arguments are, in usual Platner fashion, hogwash wishful thinking.

Why are Platner and the rest of her CCA Party colleagues so wrong on this issue? 

Let’s review.

State and federal agencies take actions and make decisions that affect Charlestown land use all the time. At the same time the Water Resources Board was buying the Glista Family land, RI DEM was buying the Audubon Society’s Kimball Wildlife Refuge. Platner and her colleagues went nuts over the WRB but uttered not a peep about DEM.

The WRB land deal with the Glistas is a private land transaction. The Glistas have the right to sell their land to whomever they choose. The Town of Charlestown has no legal right to intervene in any such private land transaction, nor to get any special notice other than what any buyer and seller of property must give the town in the form of land transfer records. 

How would you like it if Ruth Platner or the Town Council decided they didn’t like the person or entity who wanted to buy your property?

Charlestown does have jurisdiction over land uses. And no one, including WRB Director Ken Burke, has denied that. Burke patiently came to both the Planning Commission and Town Council and endured hours of abusive, whacked-out questioning. He consistently said that WRB’s mission is to acquire land to preserve water resources. How that land and those water resources are used at some point in the future then comes under the town’s purview.

Let me make that clear, the state preserves the land, and the water under it, for the town to decide when and if it will be used. The wild tales being told by the likes of Ruth Platner, Boss Gentz, Mike Chambers and the other CCA Party luminaries are pure fiction. Malicious fiction.

Despite CCA Party Council member Dan Slattery’s newly declared Charlestown border policy, we have state and federal agencies coming into and operating in Charlestown all the time – and they don’t need Charlestown’s permission to do so nor do they owe Charlestown any advance notice.

Those state and federal agencies take actions that affect Charlestown businesses, individuals and property owners all the time.

The federal Mine Safety inspectors come in and inspect our quarries and issue violations. DEM runs Burlingame and the Breachway Beach, polices the waterways and hunters, and on occasion takes action against polluters. Health Department inspectors come in and inspect food establishments and have the power to shut businesses down or deny them permits. There’s the state police, DEA, DOT, child welfare services, the IRS, ATF, ICE and on and on. Military jets and the International Space Station fly over Charlestown all the time without getting town permission.

None of these agencies needs Charlestown’s permission to enter the town to do their jobs.

Foolish hotheads like Slattery, Chambers and apparently even Ruth Platner seem to believe Charlestown is a sovereign nation, yet isn’t it ironic that they are unwilling to acknowledge that the only entity in Charlestown with true sovereignty rights is the Narragansett Indian Tribe?

The CCA Party seems eager to align itself with radicals like Blake Filippi who assert the non-existent right to “nullify” state laws that Charlestown doesn’t like. Or to set its own border rules and demand that state and federal agencies stay out of town unless they are granted permission to enter by our enlightened CCA Party town leadership.

The CCA Party is willing to trash its long proclaimed affection for open space so they can attack a political enemy like Frank Glista and claim we have rights that don’t exist – rights that we wouldn’t know how to handle even if they did exist.

Over the six years since the CCA Party overthrew Jim Mageau in 2008, they seem to get more and more irrational and despotic. But their attack on the Glistas and the Water Resource Board is probably the most radical and dangerous thing they have done to date – inserting themselves into a private land transaction and asserting primacy over the state.

If they are returned to power in November’s election, just try to imagine what they might try to do next.