Van Slyke launches comeback with another installment of “Slyke of Hand”

CCA Council candidate deploys her usual mix of twisted history and blatant false statements

By Will Collette

Ruth Platner (l) and Bonnie B. (r)

Former Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) Town Council member Bonnita B. Van Slyke wants to return to the Town Council by winning the December 2 Special Election to fill the void left by Council Vice President Rippy Serra’s unexpected death. This is her second comeback attempt after her last place finish in a field of ten in last November’s General Election.

During her 8-year run on the Council, she served as CCA founder and de facto leader Ruth Platner’s reliable lapdog, often taking ridiculous positions that Platner herself wouldn’t say publicly.

For background, Ruth Platner uses her perch as chair-for-life of the Charlestown Planning Commission to wield power over land use decisions. When the CCA controlled the Town Council, she used them to rubberstamp her shady land deals.

Platner also used compliant CCA acolytes to publicly promote her more extreme positions. Mike Chambers from the CCA client group, the Sachem Passage Association, used to play that role but in recent years, the job shifted to Bonnie B. especially after she left the Town Council in 2022.

Her positions were so outlandish that I began a popular series I dubbed “Slyke of Hand” to refute, with documentation, her CCA propaganda. Here’s one of my favorites where Van Slyke tries to justify secret shady land deals.

One of my favorites was a yarn she spun having to do with a ladder she bought when she was young. This story is supposed to explain how the CCA-run town government managed to “misplace” $3 million in town funds unnoticed for almost two years but nonetheless needed to put even more taxpayer money in various random surplus fund accounts. Her explanation:

“When I consider what is prudent, I think of the time I rented an apartment on the third floor of a 100-year-old building. The building had no external fire escape and one staircase. The building had survived 100 years; however, I purchased a foldable metal fire escape that could be lowered out a window, hoping that I had planned well enough.”

She had similar explanations for the CCA’s fevered need to engage in shady land deals to expand on Charlestown’s huge stock of open space.

Her most recent efforts have focused on an especially peculiar CCA practice of over-taxing Charlestown property to build up vast amounts of surplus cash. Here’s the backstory:

In 2015, the Platner-led CCA won a squeaker of a victory, winning voter approval by eleven votes to issue $2 million in bonds to acquire land for open space. Van Slyke cites the language of that ballot measure:

“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?” [Emphasis added (by the CCA).]

Van Slyke ignores the part of the ballot measure that says “…approve the issuance of bonds and notes therefor in an amount not to exceed $2,000,000.” That’s me adding the emphasis because as a taxpayer and voter, I think part about how the land will be purchased is the essential part of the measure.

Platner giving former Town Council Prez. Tom Gentz
his instructions before a Council meeting
(photo by Will Collette)

After the bond passed, Platner went on a buying spree. But instead of using low-interest bond funding that voters authorized, Platner used the compliant CCA-led Council to do the deals in cash, using uncommitted surplus funds – your tax dollars. Most of Platner’s deals were marked by paying far above the town property assessments.

Van Slyke fuzzes over the over-priced deals by noting matching money from DEM except that the ballot measure calls on the town to seek outside funding and partnerships. This is not some brilliant CCA achievement but represents compliance with the direction of the voters.

For reasons that have never been entirely clear, the CCA drifted into a policy that essentially committed Charlestown to pay for capital investments with taxpayer cash rather than low-interest municipal bonds. Maybe in their personal lives CCA leaders don’t believe in mortgages or car loans. They made it clear they didn’t want to issue bonds, despite voter approval. Maybe it’s about Bonnie B.’s ladder.

I wonder why the CCA fought so hard for that 2015 open space bond measure, given they didn’t want to use it.

Anyway, Bonnie B. now accuses Town Council President Deb Carney of cheating the voters by wanting to issue the bonds that voters approved ten years ago.

Van Slyke herself admits the CCA spent a million bucks buying land without issuing the voter approved bonds. That violates what the voters approved in 2015.

She condemns Deb Carney because Deb thinks taxpayers deserve some payback by putting funds misappropriated by the CCA back into the General Fund. There is NO evidence that Deb wants to spend the remaining bond authorization on anything other than what the voters approved in 2015.

Van Slyke now claims “Certainly, the Town Council should not float a bond without taxpayers being able to vote on whether they approve of $1 million to $2 million in new spending in a general election.”

Bonnie – get your story straight. The voters already approved the bonds in 2015. Issuing a bond to replenish the General Fund simply redresses the CCA’s past financial mismanagement; it's NOT about new spending.

But the truth, however inconvenient, has never stopped Bonnie B. from making false claims.