CCA
budget fails to keep promise to let taxpayers decide how to spend $3 million
surplus
By
Kenneth Robbins
NOTE: This year's budget vote will be done by mail. Every registered Charlestown voter should receive a mail-in ballot by May 15. You need to send it back by June 1.History repeats itself and those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. The truth of those two hackneyed clichés was not more in evidence than at the Charlestown Town Council's recent meeting.
Last
year, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) was decisively rebuffed by
Charlestown voters when the CCA-dominated Town Council attempted to deplete a
roughly $3 million dollar surplus in the town coffers with a proposal to build
an unneeded community center.
They then
promised to leave the surplus intact until the taxpayers of Charlestown could determine
how they wished the surplus to be used.
They even allocated $75,000 for a survey and had selected a Company to
conduct the survey until the pandemic put that effort on temporary hold.
Not
content with failing to use up the $3 million in this fashion, and in blatant
disregard of their promise to the citizens of Charlestown, they returned this
year with a different strategy to accomplish the same goal.
