Charlestown will soon hold a special election to fill Town Council vacancy

Meanwhile, CCA reminds voters again why they lost the last two elections

By Will Collette

Rippy Serra, RIP

At a December 2 Special Election, Charlestown voters will be asked to pick a replacement for recently deceased Town Council Vice-president Rippy Serra who died unexpectedly on August 8. This means another election pitting Charlestown’s former rulers, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) against their arch-rivals, Charlestown Residents United (CRU).

Rippy was one of the leaders of CRU who whipped the CCA in the 2022 election, ending their 10-year reign as Charlestown’s rulers. The CRU completed the job by beating all five CCA Council candidates in 2024.

Earlier than expected, we get to see the CCA’s plan to regain Charlestown hegemony when they pick one of their own to seek to regain a seat on the Town Council. The oddsmakers favor CCA warhorse Bonnita Van Slyke who, in the CCA’s Bizarro Charlestown, earned the honor through her last place finish in the 2024 election. But who knows, we could be in for a surprise.

Since getting pounded in 2024, the CCA has been relatively muted, posting mainly public event notices on their website. But occasionally, they post a political piece that touts their core value of stopping all housing development while pushing more town land purchases.

Dark Sky is nice, but not a cash cow

How the CCA views plans for Ninigret Park

In the 2024 election, the CCA made Charlestown’s dark sky their central campaign theme accusing the CRU of wanting to install stadium lights on every street corner, while the CCA wants to keep Charlestown dark, even during the daytime, so we can see distant galaxies with the naked eye.

Of course, I’m exaggerating but so has the CCA every time they have seriously suggested that the CRU wants to despoil Ninigret Park so they can obliterate the nighttime sky. The difference is that I’m joking and they’re not.

The CCA launched a new dark sky offensive right after losing the 2024 election with a piece called Stargazing Tourism: How Charlestown’s Dark Skies Could Boost Our Local Economy under the byline of Sarah Fletcher. Fletcher is a losing CCA Town Council candidate who had a 6^th place finish.

In this article the CCA claims Charlestown is ripe for “astro-tourism” through which Charlestown can emulate England’s northernmost region, Northumberland. The CCA claims Northumberland takes in “an estimated €25 million each year from visitors who come just to enjoy the stars.” As usual, the CCA doesn’t source their claim and I could find nothing to back it up other than articles that discuss the region’s high hopes for tourism.

Northumberland and Hadrian's Wall. From Wikipedia, 
By PaulT (Gunther Tschuch) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

I’ve been to Northumberland and neighboring Scotland. I went there to walk Hadrian’s Wall, as well as some ancient castle ruins. There is an enormous swath of dour, treeless moorland between Newcastle and Edinburgh, attractive in a Heathcliff-Wuthering Heights sort of way, where indeed the sky is dark and great for stargazing. But there’s no evidence of the CCA’s claimed tourist bonanza.

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?

Trump perverts whistle-blower law turning it into a weapon to attack his enemies

Weaponizing Regulation

By Philip Mattera, director of the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First for the Dirt Diggers Digest

Trump is looking for a few good rats to
report employers for DEI

Donald Trump has long presented himself as a foe of regulation, and since taking office for the second time he has gone to great lengths to eliminate existing rules, prevent the adoption of new ones, and dismantle entire agencies.

Yet now it appears he has discovered that regulation can be put to good use—not to control corporate misconduct but rather to advance his administration’s ideological aims and to weaken his perceived enemies.

The False Claims Act (FCA) is one of the primary tools used by the Justice Department to address fraud by federal contractors and healthcare providers. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, previously one of Trump’s criminal lawyers, recently sent a memo to DOJ prosecutors saying they should bring FCA actions against contractors or other recipients of federal funds that have diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

To promote such efforts, Blanche said he is creating a Civil Rights Fraud Initiative with teams of lawyers from the DOJ’s Fraud Division and the Civil Rights Division who would be expected to collaborate with both the U.S. Attorney Offices around the country and other federal agencies.

Blanche’s initiative is an escalation of the Trump Administration’s aggressive moves to depict DEI, which is meant to address racism and sexism, as its own form of discrimination. It is in keeping with a document issued in March by the DOJ and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning that DEI could be unlawful. And it goes along with the announcement by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs that it was looking for evidence of supposedly illegal practices in the plans submitted by federal contractors under the Biden Administration to address allegations of discrimination.

CCA complains about policy they had established

Robert’s revenge?

By Will Collette

Robert Malin, a gentle soul who showed
very little interest in revenge. RIP.

It’s an election year, so, of course, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) is seething with anger over a host of grievances and threats that they hope voters will believe and return them to power on November 5.

Among the CCA’s grievances, the CCA is angry at the Town Council majority, all of whom won under the Charlestown Residents United (CRU) banner, for not automatically filling a recent Council vacancy with their guy, the one who finished in 6th place on the ballot.

The midterm vacancy occurred due to the sad death of Council member Grace Klinger. Grace had not planned to run for reelection, but died before she could finish her term.

The CCA insisted the seat then belonged to the CCA’s Peter Gardner, the 2022 6th place finisher who got 1,655 votes (compared to Council President Deb Carney’s 2,106 votes).

Although the CCA admits on its website that Charlestown’s Town Charter does not require vacancies to be filled by the next highest vote-getter, nonetheless they were outraged the seat didn’t go to Gardner (or the 7th place finisher, another CCAer Ann Owen).

Instead, the Council exercised its prerogative to make the appointment to pick Grace’s replacement will pick from applicants who filed an application by March 1. This is the procedure for filling vacancies on boards, committees and commissions as outlined in C-168 of the Town Charter.

That triggered CCA acolyte Mikey Chambers to offer this angry commentary:

Unless I miss my guess, and I don’t believe so, the appointment will go to the highest vote getter who did not run as an Independent (CCA), but as a CRU (Democrat?) candidate. So much for the wishes of the people! This will go the way of the wishes of the people in the town-wide survey. The preference of the people will again be ignored. If you can’t see this, you haven’t been paying attention.

Mikey, it’s not just your guess that you’re missing.

First, what makes you think it will go to the “highest vote getter who did not run as an Independent (CCA)?” If the Council follows the CCA’s precedent, they might pick someone who wasn’t a candidate at all in the 2022 election.

Second, what do you mean by labelling CCA candidates as “independent” when they must all swear allegiance to the CCA platform AND if they are elected but fail to follow CCA orders, they are severely punished? CCA politicians are about as independent as members of Vladimir Putin’s government.

Third, what makes you think a putative choice of a CRU member means appointing a Democrat? In fact, the four-member CRU majority that swept the 2022 election consisted of one Democrat and three Republicans. The 5^th candidate on the CRU slate ran as unaffiliated with either party.

And fourth, Mikey, how is it that you claim a 2021 town survey, larded with push-poll questions and followed by cherry-picked CCA interpretation somehow trumps the 2022 General Election as the “wishes of the people?” Maybe you should ask someone for help in understanding how the democratic process works.

The most recent precedent for Charlestown’s current situation occurred in 2018.

After the 2016 election brought in an all-CCA Council, a vacancy opened up when Steve Williams resigned in January of 2018. The 6th place finisher was Democrat Robert Malin. In fact, Robert was the only candidate among the six running for Council who was not CCA-endorsed.

The argument was made that Robert should be chosen since he actually ran for the office.

CCA President Leo Mainelli disagreed, stating at the February 12, 2018 Council meeting that George Tremblay should be appointed even though he was not on the ballot. Those so-called independent remaining four CCA Councilors dutifully followed Leo's command.

As it turns out, had Robert been appointed to the vacancy, he would not have fulfilled his term, dying of cancer in June 2018. George Tremblay suffered a stroke one year into his appointed term but did finish it out but did not run for re-election in November of 2018.

How a municipality fills vacancies to elected office is a matter of law. Some towns, such as Richmond, say in their Town Charters that vacancies are filled by the next highest vote getter.

However, remember that the MAGA majority running Richmond decided not to follow that clear legal mandate when it selected a right-wing nut who didn’t even run to fill a Richmond vacancy on the Chariho School Committee. The state Supreme Court ruled the town had to follow its own Charter and booted the MAGA choice.

Charlestown leaves the decision on how to fill vacancies to the Council. That’s what the CCA said in 2018 when it chose Tremblay over Malin and that’s what the current CRU majority is saying now.

How you feel about that has everything to do with how you feel about who is running the Town Council.

Voters can decide this question if a Charter amendment question is put on the ballot. Maybe it’s time to settle that question, and I don’t mean by running some self-serving survey.

Grace Klinger, thank you for your service to Charlestown

Charlestown Town Councilor Grace Klinger dies at age 79

By Will Collette

Grace died suddenly, last Saturday, though she had been struggling with ill health for quite some time.

Indeed, because of her health, Grace had not intended to run for re-election this November.

Though Grace and I were not part of the same political tribe, I enjoyed working with her and loved her good humor and dedication to the town. 

Her dedication to sensible land use practices is what formed the bond between Grace and me. She was especially keen to apply common sense to land acquisition and conservation. She vehemently opposed numerous Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) land deals, such as the ones detailed HERE.

One of my favorite stories about fights where Grace played a pivotal role is the 2011 phony scandal concocted by the CCA through its Deputy Council Boss Dan Slattery. Yes, old-time sport fans, I'm talking about the Phantom Property Scandal.

Slattery told the Council that it had come to his attention that there were poachers whose home gardens were encroaching on town owned property. Slattery called for an immediate audit of all town properties, including all the little patches and triangles of land that pepper the map, a full inspection and that perps like the alleged outlaw gardeners be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Then Councilor Lisa DiBello added that these properties should be sign-posted, if not fenced in.

The Conservation Commission under Lillian's and Grace's leadership duly conducted the inventory, found lots of properties, ranging in size from Ninigret Park to storm cisterns. They did not find any evidence of any alien invaders or evil-doers.

However, they did note - and kept on file - records of properties the town didn't need that could be donated or sold. Since the CCA and its de facto leader Planning Commissar Ruth Platner would rather saw off their noses then let go of even a square inch of vacant land, the Conservation Commission waited until a new Council majority took office, In May 2023, they released a report on these properties. The report also listed town-owned property that could be used to improve the public's access to the beach.

Other folks who knew Grace have their own stories and reasons to honor Grace's memory. She will be missed.

Plus, she will be hard to replace since they aren't making very many of her style of Republican environmentalist anymore. But you can count on some upcoming battles over what to do about her vacant seat on the Charlestown Town Council.

--------------

From Grace's obituary:

Grace Frances Klinger, 79, of Charlestown, passed away peacefully on Saturday, January 20, 2024. She was born in Queens, New York to her loving parents, the late Thomas and Catherine (Callan) Hartigan. Grace was the beloved wife of Frederick H. Klinger for 52 years.

Grace was an active parishioner at St. Mary’s Church/St. James Chapel and a current member of the Charlestown Town Council. She was a Certified Master Gardner, former Chairperson of the Charlestown Conservation Commission, and former president of the Federated Garden Clubs of Coral Springs, Florida, Brookfield, Connecticut, and Westerly, Rhode Island. Grace was the owner of Yester-Year Antiques for over 40 years.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Suzanne Viens, her husband, Andrew, and her adoring grandchildren Riley, Reagan, and Rowan all of Dover, Massachusetts. She also leaves behind her cherished nephews, Brian, Dennis, Thomas, William, Kevin, and a niece, Maureen. She is predeceased by her parents and sisters, Maureen A. Hartigan, Anne P. Hartigan, and Catherine T. McNicholl.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Saturday, February 10, 2024, at 11:00 am in St. James Chapel, 2079 Matunuck School House Road, Charlestown, Rhode Island. Burial will take place at a later date in Rhode Island Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery in Exeter.

In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate donations in Grace’s memory to the Maureen A. Hartigan Scholarship Fund, St. John’s University, Office of Planned Gifts, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens, NY 11439.

Tribute comments may be left on the Avery-Storti website here.