The CCA: Political party … or cult?

Part 2 of “CCA rhetoric versus reality”

By Neniu Sciu
Click here for Part 1

I have a confession to make.

I’ve been calling the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) a political party, but I’ve since seen the error of my ways. I’d say I’ve seen the light, but we have a dark-sky ordinance.

I was wrong, and the CCA is right. The CCA is not a political party.

They’re a cult.

Likelihood of settlement in DiBello case increases

Council schedules second closed-door meeting on DiBello case at town lawyer’s office in Warwick

By Will Collette

The Charlestown Town Council has posted notice of yet another closed-door, executive session meeting. This one will take place in Warwick, at the office of Town Solicitor Peter Ruggiero. The only item on the agenda is discussion of Councilor Lisa DiBello’s lawsuit against the Town of Charlestown. This will be the second closed door meeting on the DiBello case this week.

Charlestown Town Council holds meeting in Warwick on Thursday

It will also be the first time I can remember a Charlestown Town Council meeting being held outside of Charlestown. Under the state’s Open Meetings Act, members of the public are entitled to attend – in this case, you can drive up to Warwick – although you are not entitled to witness the executive session. Presumably, Ruggiero’s office will make some provision for spectators who want to see what goes on before and after the Council enters its executive session.

I could find no provision in Charlestown’s Home Rule Charter that actually requires Charlestown governmental meetings to be held in Charlestown. Maybe this is a trial balloon – after the election, if the CCA Party retains power, they might decide to hold meetings in western Connecticut or Florida to make it easier for their campaign financial backers to attend.

But I digress. Two closed door meetings in the same week with the second one in the town lawyer’s office tells me that something big is up. Probably a settlement. As I have often noted, cases like this almost never go to trial; they are almost always settled, and often when the municipality’s insurance carrier[1] insists on it.

The best way to understand the issues is to start by reading the allegations Councilor DiBello filed against the Town and nearly a dozen past and present town officials. You can read her allegations in their entirety and in her own words (well, as interpreted by her lawyer) by clicking here.

Dick Frank purged from the Zoning Board by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance

Second board member ousted as CCA stacks Zoning with CCA loyalists

The CCA Party will tolerate no deviation from their party line

By Will Collette

Long-serving member of the Charlestown Zoning Board of Review (ZBR) Richard Frank, husband of former Town Council member Marge Frank, learned at the July 17 Town Council meeting that despite his long and faithful service to town and his willingness to serve another term, he was being kicked off the ZBR.

Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) Council hit man Dan Slattery made the announcement during the usually routine portion of the town council agenda for re-appointment of volunteer commissioners who wish to be re-appointed, that he stood against Dick Frank’s re-appointment and his two CCA Party colleagues, Council Boss Tom Gentz and George Tremblay, nodded to indicate that a majority wanted to purge Frank.

Whalerock: Zoning Board hearing #3 produces a moment of enlightenment

It’s not supposed to make sense

By Will Collette

OK, so I just got back from the third of a seemingly endless series of Zoning Board of Review (ZBR) hearings on the Whalerock wind farm proposal. Like Hearing #1 and Hearing #2, Hearing #3 was another display of dueling experts and dueling lawyers in a kangaroo court atmosphere.

Some of what went on tonight was slightly interesting and marginally different than the prior two hearings, but in the middle of watching a distinguished scientist from URI, Dr. Jay Singer, try to address public fears about wind turbines and health effects, I had a moment of satori, of a Zen-like clarity.

Singer was trying to explain how scientists study, quantify and theorize based on a discipline that requires rigorous scrutiny and the ability to duplicate results often enough to generalize. I heard the crowd jeer and catcall him, and saw some of the ZBR members display – sorry, guys – some woefully ignorant behavior.

It seemed that nothing Singer could say about the science could sway the somewhat diminished crowd or the two ZBR members (Crosson and Rzewuski) who have pre-judged this case from their firm belief that “Wind Turbine Syndrome (WTS)” exists. No matter how thoroughly Singer debunked WTS, it made no difference.

That’s when it hit me: this debate over Whalerock is not about science or economics. It’s more like an argument over religion. 

Charlestown’s $50,000 Whalerock Special Counsel could be violating conflict of interest rules

By representing two different client groups in the same case, Mancini could be failing them both

By Will Collette

NOTE: the second in Charlestown's new dramatic summer drama, the hearings of Whalerock before the Zoning Board, takes place tonight at 7 PM at Charlestown Elementary.

The CCA Party majority Town Council emerged from its May 13 executive session and announced they had decided to spend $50,000 to hire a Special Counsel to represent the town. This Counsel would represent the town before the Zoning Board’s hearings on developer Larry LeBlanc’s application for a Special Use Permit for the Whalerock industrial wind project. By May 17, the town had hired John O. Mancini, who normally represents developers, as Charlestown’s new Special Counsel.

When Mancini introduced himself at the Zoning Board’s first Whalerock hearing on May 21, he said he was representing Charlestown and some unidentified abutters.

I was surprised to hear him say that and it stuck in my mind that there are generally problems when an attorney represents two different groups of clients on the same case. As I dug deeper, my concerns intensified.

Charlestown women in politics

REPRINT: Charlestown women in politics

By Catherine O’Reilly Collette

This resolution gave women the vote
in Rhode Island

Editor's note: this article originally ran on the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website to mark March as Women’s History Month.

In 1922, only two years after the US Constitution was amended to give women the vote, Rhode Island elected the first woman to the Rhode Island Legislature. She was Isabelle Ahern O’Neill of Providence and was elected to the House of Representatives and then the RI Senate where she served until 1934. She fought for pensions for widows and helped to create a Rhode Island Narcotics Board which was a model for its time.

She was quoted as saying “I will not wear a hat to session nor do I want the men to stop smoking or stop doing anything they normally do….I want to be treated the same.”

Ms. O’Neill began her career as an actor and orator, perfect skills for political life. She served in the state legislature until she was recruited to work in the Roosevelt Administration where she worked until 1943, whereupon she came back to Rhode Island to work in the state Labor Department. She lived to age 94 and died in 1975.

Click here to see the 2007 General Assembly resolution honoring Ms. O’Neill and Rhode Island’s other women legislators.

In 1927, the second woman was elected to the legislature, Charlestown’s own Lulu Mowry Schlesinger. In 1929, Ms. Schlesinger became the first woman elected to the Rhode Island Senate.

Lulu Schlesinger’s beautiful 1910 home on Old Post Road is still standing and occupied.

Still due: some straight answers from Councilor DiBello

DiBello offers drama instead of facts

DiBello on "Let's Make a Deal" on Oct. 4 where she contradicted what
she wrote in her Sun letter

By Will Collette

Charlestown Council member Lisa DiBello is a very skilled performer. Her favorite character is playing the victim. That’s how she got herself elected in 2010, playing off a sympathy vote arising from her May 2010 firing for cause. 

Now it seems, based on her October 25, 2012, letter in the Westerly Sun, her 2012 reelection hopes rest on another sympathy vote, this time claiming that I am bullying her by writing and documenting her conduct as a former town employee, present town Council member and active litigant against the town of Progressive Charlestown.

Ms. DiBello’s victim act is a true tour de force, given that she is suing the town of Charlestown for $1.5 million in a conspiracy lawsuit that, if you read her own words in her lawsuit, is at once wildly fantastic when it comes to the actual conspiracy and also very damaging to her own cause. By her own words, Ms. DiBello describes how she practically dared former Town Administrator Bill DiLibero to fire her by defying his supervisory role over her and then was SHOCKED when he did.

Time for Answers from Councilor DiBello, Part 5

Does Councilor Lisa DiBello plan to play “Let’s Make a Deal” with the CCA, Charlestown?

By Will Collette

Word around town is that Councilor Lisa DiBello, fresh off of her appearance on “Let’s Make A Deal” (click here to watch) where she won three TV sets worth $4998, wants to make a deal with the Charlestown Citizens Alliance to cash out her $1.5 million in legal claims against Charlestown (perhaps in a lame-duck session in early November after the election) in return for her support of the CCA’s slate in the November 6 Election.

The recent settlement in a precursor case (more on that below) lends credence to the rumors that Lisa is about to get what’s behind Curtain #3.

TONIGHT: CCA Surprise!

Promises of consultation broken

Planning Commission and Town Council pop short-notice workshop

By Will Collette

You just can’t beat the CCA-controlled Town Council and Planning Commission for their “open, transparent, professional and civil” approach to town government.

With the barest, minimum legal notice, no fanfare and no supporting documents posted on Clerkbase, the Town Council and Planning Commission have sprung a special “workshop” to discuss forming a “Historic District Committee” on Monday night. There’s not even a CCA e-bleat.

The last time this issue was discussed was at the July 9 Town Council meeting, raised by Marge Frank as an issue that should be considered. Planning Commissar Ruth Platner immediately stepped up to the podium to argue against having a Historic District Commission because, she said, it could apply very strict rules to historic areas. Click here to listen to the discussion.

TOWN COUNCIL: Big night for the banal

Town Council postmortem

New CPD Chief Jeffrey Allen

By Will Collette

Maybe we’re all just exhausted – or more likely sick and tired – but the September 10 Town Council meeting felt a lot like a “Going Out of Business Sale,” even though it started upbeat. 

After all, how can honoring a new Eagle Scout and swearing in a new, well-credentialed police chief not be upbeat?

But once the Council shifted to the worn-out, washed-out and frankly banal matters that populated the rest of the agenda, it was all downhill from there.

Town Council meeting – three hours of my life I’ll never get back

Three hours of tedium punctuated by a pointless debate over affordable housing and a sprinkling of the surreal

By Will Collette

It’s a wrap on the Town Council’s deliberations for August. The only really good news is that they did complete their lighter-than-usual agenda in the allotted three hours and will not need a second meeting.

Easily, the most disturbing part of this meeting was a long and rancorous debate among the Councilors over whether Charlestown should try to meet its affordable housing obligations under state law or continue trying to push the CCA’s position that state law should not apply to Charlestown.

Boss Gentz painted himself into an environmental corner

Product Stewardship is pure common sense, except to him...He called it "onerous"

By Will Collette

One of Rep. Donna Walsh’s top legislative priorities, right up there with the economy and ethics, is the environment. 

She has covered the full spectrum of environmental problems ranging from groundwater protection to open space, toxic waste to tick bites. And for her work, she has received accolades and awards from most of Rhode Island’s environmental organizations.

Among her major environmental initiatives is “product stewardship.” Product stewardship means requiring the manufacturers and sellers of problematic products to be responsible in some significant way for what happens to those products after consumers are through with them.

Town admits the Charter Revision Advisory Committee violated the Open Meetings Act

But claims the violation was “unintentional”

By Will Collette

For the second time this week, Charlestown town government had an “oops” event over its compliance with the state Open Meetings Act.

The first time was Thursday. That’s when the judge in Donoghue v. Charlestown ruled that the Town Council did indeed violate the Open Meetings Act when they failed to properly inform the public that they intended to vote on February 13 to pay to the Charlestown Land Trust in the Y-Gate Scandal.

The second time was Friday when Town Solicitor Peter Ruggiero admitted the Charter Revision Advisory Committee (CRAC) violated the law by failing to file the meeting minutes of its final and decisive meeting on April 30.

The Y-Gate Scandal – more deception surfaces

Discoveries from deep within town records

Sort of like the way Y-Gate was handled from the start.
Read the rest of this Dilbert cartoon here.

By Will Collette

Sparked by revelations in the sworn testimony of Council member Gregg Avedisian, old Y-Gate records are now getting a lot of deep scrutiny, and not just by your Progressive Charlestown staff, with some surprising results.

Read Avedisian’s sworn deposition in the Y-Gate Scandal by clicking here.

Readers are e-mailing in tips about records they are finding by going back into attachments to minutes of meetings from over a year ago.

A picture is emerging of a Town Council all too willing to be played and manipulated by such Y-Gate players as Boston lawyer and de facto “mayor” of the Sonquipaug neighborhood Joanne D’Alcomo, Charlestown Land Trust Treasurer Russ Ricci and Planning Commissar Ruth Platner.

Judge to issue ruling on part of the Donoghue v. Charlestown “Y-Gate” case

Y-Gate lawsuit to continue
Also, more from Avedisian testimony

By Will Collette

After a Town Council majority (Boss Tom Gentz, Gregg Avedisian and Marge Frank) voted at its February 13 meeting to give $475,000 of your tax dollars to the Charlestown Land Trust so it can buy the derelict and abandoned Westerly YMCA camp, the deal was “put on hold” by a lawsuit by Dr. Jack Donoghue.

Dr. Donoghue charged the Council violated the state Open Meetings Act by failing to give the public proper notice that they planned to vote on a big money deal on February 13.

That was then, this is now

CCA used to be irate about "secret" meetings, even perfectly legal executive sessions. Now they’re fine with them

By Will Collette

There was a time when the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) claimed to be the champion of open, honest, transparent government. After all, this was their rallying cry when they organized to oppose former Town Council President Jim Mageau (2006-2008).

They even continued to trumpet this cause after they won all five Town Council seats in the November 2008 elections.

Here’s an e-bleat the CCA sent out on June 23, 2009 attacking the Affordable Housing Commission for going into executive session to discuss the acquisition of property next to Town Hall which was then being considered for a new affordable housing complex.

“How do you kill a Zombie?”

How do we stop the Y-Gate Zombie from stealing OUR tax dollars?

Y-Gate - the issue that wouldn't die

By Will Collette

Despite an outrageous attempt by CCA Town Council President Boss Tom Gentz to ramrod a vote on Y-Gate at the end of the Town Council's second overtime Monday night, action on Y-Gate has been postponed until June 25th. 

This move was so over the top, that even Gentz's usually reliable cohort, Deputy Dan Slattery said NO to continuing the Council meeting to take up Y-Gate.

Boss Gentz is now out of the closet as the leader in pushing this once dead taxpayer rip-off , now resurrected after a secret May 14 meeting between the Council and the Y-Gate players.

That means there is still time for you to contact the Town Council members to voice your opinion.

Who REALLY owns Ninigret Park?

Confused Consensus, continued

Charlie Vandemoer - "I'm not a lawyer" but here's my
interpretation of the effect of  Goulding's decision

By Will Collette

The definitive answer that came out of the June 11 Town Council meeting was…WE DO. We, the citizens of Charlestown hold two deeds to the property the town manages as Ninigret Park, and those are the two documents that count..

In a long and tense discussion, the clearest answer came near the end when Charlestown Town Solicitor Peter Ruggiero noted that the town holds two deeds, one to 172 acres of land for recreational use subject to a use plan approved by the National Park Service and one to 55 acres of land that Charlestown purchased directly from the federal government free and clear for $279,000.

Several earlier speakers, including our very insistent federal overseer, Charlie Vandemoer of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, had insisted that all of Ninigret Park, the 172 acres and the 55 acres, were governed by the 1979 final decision of GSA's Acting Administrator Paul Goulding about the disposition of the land.

Y-Gate Zombie has risen from the dead

Town Council plans to vote Monday to pay $398,000 in Charlestown taxpayer dollars for worthless easement

By Will Collette

Tucked into its jam-packed agenda for the Town Council meeting next Monday, June 11, is “Item 18.f. Approval of purchasing conservation easement on YMCA property for $398,000, in conjunction with purchase of same property for preservation by the Charlestown Land Trust, using open space and recreation bond funds”

The Y-Gate Scandal is back. This item is being spearheaded by the odd alliance of Councilor Gregg Avedisian and Town Council President Boss Tom Gentz (CCA), with Councilor Marge Frank providing the third and deciding vote. It may have grown out of a secret session held in the Town Council's executive session last month (click here).

This action to rob from Charlestown taxpayers to make a gift to the Charlestown Land Trust, the Westerly YMCA and the non-resident vacation home owners in the Sonquipaug Association is still being done by these same Council members. These members know the Westerly YMCA’s purchase price is based on an appraisal based on fictional conditions and that the Charlestown Land Trust considers its conservation easements to be worth less than zero.

This transaction will also be done without a vote by Charlestown residents. The principle beneficiaries, ironically, will be non-residents.

Charlie Vandemoer: Dupe or Duplicitous, Part 2

The Battle for Ninigret Park begins

By Will Collette

Read: "Searching for a Home for the 'Ninigret Bomb'" by clicking here.
Read Part 1 by clicking here.

Part 1 was published Monday morning just after midnight. Later that same day, through one of those coincidences you just can't plan, a letter to the editor by none other than Charlie Vandemoer ran in the Westerly Sun. That letter is a remarkable example of Charlie Vandemoer's choice to inject himself into Charlestown politics, to the detriment of Charlestown. Read it yourself by clicking here, then please read Part 2 of this series.

In Part 1, I used records received from the US Department of Interior to show how our local federal overseer, Ninigret Wildlife Refuge manager Charlie Vandemoer of the US Fish and Wildlife Service was at the heart of one of Charlestown’s most divisive political battles of the past year.

He triggered the series of events by writing a letter to the state Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) to block sports lighting funds the Parks and Recreation Commission had been seeking.