PREVIEW: Town Council meets Monday

Some items to watch

Charlestown Town Council rolls again

By Will Collette

Here is the official Town Council agenda with some preview commentary from me shown in bold red lettering.

There are some items of special note. Appearing early in the meeting is discussion by the Council of who to appoint to replace the late Richard Hosp on the Budget Commission. 

There are three qualified candidates. Past precedent – indeed, made almost a sacred precedent by the CCA Party – is to appoint from among qualified candidates based on the order their applications were received. 

Using that criteria, the appointment should go to Priscilla Flynn. However, Budget Commission chair recommends skipping over her and going instead to Robert Krause. There’s a lot of politics behind this one.

There are a flurry of new ordinances and resolutions on this meeting’s agenda but two that interested me both relate to issues that rose during the long controversy over the Copar Quarry, and both show how ineffectual the CCA Party-led Town Council has been and continues to be on the issues.

The first is an ordinance to change business licenses, but instead of adding a long-needed “bad actor” provision that would have kept Copar out of Charlestown, all this ordinance does is offer a symbolic cut in the annual business license fee.

The second is yet another version of a Council resolution asking the General Assembly to intervene on the matter of regulating quarries. After two years, we’re still stuck at this stage. Except this year, this resolution will have to be carrying by two new General Assembly members – Rep. Flip Filippi and Sen. Elaine Morgan – who have no political clout at the State House whatsoever and little ability to move this resolution. The Council will probably once again blame the legislature for its own gutless inaction.

But the most serious item on the agenda is, as usual, stuck at the end of the agenda. This is a resolution calling for a new $2 million open space bond question to be put before the voters. This time, the CCA Party left off “recreation” and seem to want this money to be given to the Council (actually more likely to Planning Commissar Ruth Platner) a Amex Platinum card with a $2 million credit limit for open space acquisition with no further voter accountability.

This measure demonstrates that the CCA Party town leadership have learned NOTHING from the bloody battles fought over the beach pavilions, Ninigret Park, the YMCA Y-Gate scandal and the Whalerock controversy.

UPDATED: Town Council meets Monday, January 12

Blah, blah, blah

By Will Collette

UPDATE: When I filed my Council preview last Friday, I noted last Friday that the Clerkbase agenda for tonight's meeting was missing documents, those documents were posted this morning. They include Town Administrator Stankiewicz's monthly report and proposed new Ordinance #369.

* * * 

The all-CCA Party Town Council meets on Monday night. They have an agenda. The published one appears below. The unpublished one has already been settled in the secret CCA Party club house.

There aren’t many items on this agenda that are likely to spark much controversy among the all-CCA Councilors. If there's going to be any controversy, it will have to come from the public and I'd rate the odds of that very low.

There are some technical problems with the documents linked to various agenda items. More on that below the fold. One key item to watch in this meeting comes near the end of the meeting when the Council must choose between two contenders for an open seat on the Economic Improvement Commission.

Other than that, the show must go on.

Charlestown Tapas

Sixteen tasty news nuggets

By Will Collette

Suicide squirrel cripples Charlestown this morning.

Just before 10:30 AM today (Monday), the lights went out for 3,149 Charlestown National Grid customers, businesses and residents alike, as National Grid suffered an outage that knocked out power for nearly the entire town, except for those with back-up generators or a green energy source (except that's not encouraged in Charlestown which effectively BANS wind power).

The Providence Journal reports that it was a suicide squirrel that shorted out the system. My favorite humorist Dave Barry really hates squirrels (click here for recent example) and would almost certainly accuse the now-deceased squirrel of an act of terrorism.

Richard Hosp passes away at Age 72

Former Town Council and Budget Commission member Richard Hosp has died. You can read his official obituary in the Westerly Sun by clicking here. Since he and his wife Martha retired to Charlestown in 1999, Mr. Hosp had been a dedicated community servant.

I admired him for standing up to the CCA Party, even though he ran on their first slate in 2008. I found him to be an intelligent, thoughtful and honorable man. While I didn’t always agree with him, I always took his counsel to heart. Our condolences to his family and friends.

Animosity between Tribe and Charlestown marks third day of court hearings 

Just a few days ago, I reported on signs that the long-running cold war between Charlestown town government and the Narragansett Tribe is heating up. I noted that a minor misdemeanor case was turning into a showdown between the sharp differences in how Charlestown town leaders and Tribal leaders view the core issue of sovereignty. At the December 18 hearing during the third day of testimony, those differences became quite stark.

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.

Charlestown Town Council Preview – Columbus Day pushes meeting to Tuesday

Last regular meeting of this Council session before the election

Deputy Dan's last round-up

By Will Collette

This will be the valedictory meeting for Town Councilors Lisa DiBello and Dan Slattery who have both decided not to run for re-election. 

Councilor DiBello just signed a settlement agreement with Charlestown to end her $1.5 million civil lawsuit for a total of $450,000. She has decided to take the money and not run for a third term, even though her name will still be on the ballot on November 4. She told the Westerly Sun she is thinking about leaving town.

Councilor Dan Slattery, after two terms as the CCA Party’s head-banger on the Council, did not even file a declaration for a third term. After his very colorful career on the Council, I can’t wait to see what he decides to do next – maybe he’ll go back to being President of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance or will start a private investigation company or train attack dogs or maybe go into the charter school business with Ron Areglado and Donna Chambers.  

This meeting will address the future of the Charlestown Community Garden, the town’s next bumbling move to curb mining operations and perhaps the completion of the CCA Party’s stacking of the membership of the Zoning Board of Review. As always, we could see some surprise craziness where we least expect it.

The meeting will be held on Tuesday, not the usual Monday, due to Monday being Columbus Day. 

Here’s the agenda with my snarky commentary in bold red.

Town Council Preview – Tuesday, not Monday (VJ Day)

Three meetings Tuesday 

By Will Collette

Rhode Island is the only state in the union that still celebrates VJ Day - Victory over Japan in World War II - as a legal holiday. So the regular meetings of the Charlestown Town Council will be Tuesday, not Monday.

Before Tuesday night’s regular Town Council meeting, there will be two special meetings, both held primarily in closed, executive session. This is pretty unusual to have two. 

The first of these meetings will take place at the Charlestown-Richmond Fire Station, north of Town Hall at noon. The sole topic of that meeting will be Councilor Lisa DiBello’s long-running conspiracy lawsuit against Charlestown over her May 2010 firing. She had once offered to settle the case for $1.5 million (the link takes you to my January 2012 article and contains copies of the settlement offer from DiBello's attorney).

Cases like hers are often settled at the insistence of the insurance company for the municipality. This one is ripe for a similar resolution and it would end the odd circumstance – unique, I am told – where a sitting Council member is suing the town they are supposed to be serving.

However, in a letter to the editor published in Friday's Westerly Sun (but not on their electronic version), former Town Councilor Jim Mageau claimed that Town Council Boss Tom Gentz (CCA Party) has been holding up a settlement agreement. Mageau also claimed that a "whispering campaign" against DiBello had been going on in Charlestown.

The second closed, executive session will be at 6:30 PM back at Town Hall. The sole item on this agenda is the recently decided case of McCabe v. Charlestown. Click here for the decision and here for the news round-up where I reported on this case. In a nutshell, Paul McCabe sued Charlestown after he was found guilty in Municipal Court of failing to replace an old, illegal cesspool.

He appealed to Superior Court and the Court upheld Charlestown in every respect, except the way the notice was given that started the daily fines against McCabe. The Court determined the fines would start the day the decision was issued and would continue until McCabe replaces the cesspool with an acceptable new system. Not sure what this item is about, and we won’t know because it will be discussed behind closed doors.

The regular meeting agenda is unusually light on terrible or controversial items. Perhaps this is due to the coming election, with the CCA Party incumbents hoping that voters will only remember the last couple of Council meetings, and not all the other crazy stuff they have done during this Council term. Like the last couple of Council meetings (click here and here and here and here for more).

Among the matters to watch are the CCA Party’s continuing effort to stack the Zoning Board with its loyalists, the renaming of Mud Cove; and Chuck Wentworth wants to plant a tree (I’m dying to see how the CCA Boys will drag this one off the Consent Agenda for debate to pander to their political base).

Either the meeting will be short, or the Councilors will grab at some items as reasons to fight, or more likely, pontificate.

Missing from the agenda: any discussion about the state’s intended purchase of the Audubon Society’s Kimball Wildlife Sanctuary. You would think the Council would be all over this given the new CCA Party Campaign Platform statement that “CCA-endorsed candidates are committed to opposing state legislative and administrative initiatives that threaten to remove local control over Planning, Zoning, and the protection of Charlestown’s environment and community character.”

This bit of CCA double-speak is intended to cover themselves. At the last two Council meetings, the CCA Boys made idiots of themselves attacking the state Water Resource Board for its planned purchase of several parcels from the Glista family to be held as open space to preserve the clean water underneath.

Why did they go after the Water Resources Board for wanting to buy land for open space and not go after DEM for wanting to buy land for open space? I specifically asked Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz by e-mail if there was any interaction with the state over the Kimball Wildlife Refuge deal and he did not respond.

Here is the meeting agenda, shown in the actual order of business, with my usual obnoxious and snarky remarks shown in bold red.

Charlestown Tapas

State Senate nail-bitter, and other tasty tidbits

By Will Collette

Cameron Ennis – despite break from BOE, still might not make the ballot

Cameron Ennis of Charlestown, a newly minted lawyer, filed his declaration to run as an independent against first-term incumbent state Senator Catherine Cool Rumsey. Apparently Ennis forgot to read the candidates’ rule book published by the Secretary of State and collected signatures on his Nomination petition without regard to where the signer lives.

The rulebook says each town within a district must be on a separate page so that the signatures can be turned in to the Town Clerk in each municipality – e.g. Charlestown signatures go to Charlestown, Richmond to Richmond, etc. Ennis simply turned in all of his 100 signatures to Charlestown Town Hall, thinking Town Clerk Amy Weinreich would take of this for him.

Wrong. Charlestown only validated the Charlestown signatures – 49 of them – leaving Ennis 51 signatures short of the required 100. Ennis appealed to the state Board of Elections and the BOE decided to cut him a break, even though he failed to follow the rules. They gave him an extra 72 hours to get his signatures from the other towns validated by the other towns.

Town Council meeting preview – TONIGHT at 7 PM

Quarry ordinance, plan for former Whalerock site, impending war with Hopkinton and Richmond on the agenda

By Will Collette

Before the public portion of the Charlestown Town Council meeting, there will be a closed, Executive Session. The only item on the agenda is the lawsuit against Charlestown and several present and former Charlestown officials by Council member Lisa DiBello. That lawsuit is now over two years old and may be ripe for settlement. We will not know what they discussed unless they take a vote and then tell us about it.

Despite a seemingly full agenda, there are actually only three matters that seem likely to take up a lot of time. Coming first in the order of business is a continuation of the discussion about the town’s plans for the future of the Charlestown Moraine Preserve. This is the property bought by the taxpayers for $2.1 million in open space/recreation bond money last summer to end the on-going battle over the proposed Whalerock wind farm.

While there seems to be broad agreement that this is a great piece of land, there’s debate about whether to give away property rights to an outside group to “lock up” the land as open space and close the door on any other conceivable municipal use in the future. 

Former Town Council President Deb Carney argued at the last Council session that locking up the property and foreclosing other uses was ill-advised and unnecessary while CCA Party Mike Chambers mounted a personal attack on Carney in the Westerly Sun. Mikey seems to want to give away the land, largely for his own self-interest as Richard Hosp pointed out in a great letter to the Sun. Deb skewered Chambers for his usual misstatements of fact, if not outright lies.

Let's give that $2.1 million parcel to the deserving
poor, like the Charlestown Land Trust or the
Arnolda neighborhood

Town Council Boss Tom Gentz of the CCA Party crafted a memo some months ago listing several potential recipients of a conservation easement to lock up the property. However, after pursuing Gentz’s list, the Conservation Commission discovered that only one of those groups – the Charlestown Land Trust – is still interested. Readers may remember the central role played by the Trust in the 2012 Y-Gate Scandal.

If the Town Council majority insists on locking up the land by giving away a conservation easement, it will have to go before the voters, probably at this summer’s financial referendum.

Next in the batting order is what to do about mining. The Council has before it a flawed but important ordinance to ban new mining and blasting and to regulate existing mining. Some Council action is needed at this meeting because the six-month moratorium the Council passed expires this month.

They will hold a public hearing and will no doubt hear pro and con testimony. Then they must decide whether to pass the ordinance, flaws and all, or send it back to the Planning Commission to fix while extending the expiring moratorium. Or do something else.

Toward the end of the meeting, the Council is scheduled to take up five closely related issues all tied into the potential civil war within the Chariho School District pitting Charlestown against Hopkinton and Richmond over the apportionment of power, control and costs. 

CCA Party Council member Dan “Vladimir” Slattery wants war in order to preserve the status quo. Maybe he’ll talk about mobilizing the Charlestown town militia to occupy the Richmond piece of Carolina to protect ethnic Charlietowners who happen to live on the wrong side of the town line.

If Charlestown withdraws from Chariho, which is what Vlad Slattery is threatening to do, we will need an alternative way to teach Charlestown’s children. Planning Commissar Ruth Platner may suggest that we deport families with school-age children.

Our current Chariho School Committee members "Swami" Ron Areglado and Donna Chambers might want to start up a charter school or craft a home schooling curriculum for them.

Or maybe we’re going to need that land in the Charlestown Moraine Preserve for a new school building.

Here’s the agenda listed in the actual order of business. The Clerkbase documents were not posted after business hours on Friday, so not all of them are posted below. I think I managed to get the important ones linked. My snarky comments are in bold red.

What’s the Rush?

The Charlestown Moraine Preserve, a Needed Pause

View from the Champlain Glacier Park in Westerly. Westerly took its
publicly owned stretch of moraine and turned it into a 
beautiful educational site

By Cheryl Dowdell

EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this also ran as a letter to the editor in the Westerly Sun. It is another rebuttal to CCA Party pundit and appointee to the Zoning Board of Review Mike Chambers. Chambers wrote a fact-challenged attack letter to the Sun against Deb Carney. Click here for Deb’s rebuttal.

Richard Hosp also wrote to the Sun to say he was “offended by the inappropriate personal attack by Michael Chambers on Deb Carney.” Hosp said “I’m not sure what Mr. Chambers has done for the town except to be desperately opposed to anything being built in his backyard” noting that the Moraine Preserve is in Chambers’ backyard, a fact Chambers left out of his attack letter. 

And the story goes on. Today's Sun ran a Chambers' letter that tries to refute Deb Carney's rebuttal. Advice to Mikey: there's that old saying "when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." - wc

A beautiful piece of property has recently been purchased by the Charlestown and has been named The Charlestown Moraine Preserve. The remaining Open Space/ Recreation Bond was used to complete the $2.1 Million purchase. This transaction took 70 plus acres out of private development, permanently, and put that acreage in our hands, the taxpayers of Charlestown.

To seal the deal, 2 buildable lots with magnificent panoramic ocean views were split off from the town's open space purchase. A core group of perhaps 300 people in town, many who abut the property, followed this issue closely, attended meetings and communicated opinions with their Town Councilors. Much treasure in addition to the purchase price was spent for legal counsel, including an additional $50,000 for a special counsel.

While talking about this with many people living in other areas in town not near the new Moraine Preserve, I am concerned about how little so many of the other 7,000 plus taxpayers know about the purchase, how quickly it came about,  how it was funded and that two private lots were part of the deal.

UPDATED: How much is LarryLand worth?

What will it cost the taxpayers to end a decade of high anxiety?

By Will Collette

How much is it worth?

No matter the outcome of the Zoning Board of Review hearings on Larry LeBlanc’s proposed Whalerock industrial wind project, Charlestown’s on-going nightmare will continue. 

It will continue until either Larry LeBlanc builds something on his 81 acres overlooking Route One that will give him and his partners a profit or somebody pays him the price he needs to walk away.

Town Council meeting agenda – the actual order of business

Monthly Progressive Charlestown service to the confused

By Will Collette

The first couple of times I went to Town Council meetings, I was hopelessly confused. There’s a stack of agendas on the front table, but the actual order of business never resembles the order on the official agenda. That’s because the Council switches the order of business every month, but publishes and distributes the official agenda as if nothing has been changed.

As a service to our readers, we’ve been translating the official agendas each month to reflect the actual order in which the Council addresses them. And of course, I add a little of my own snarky commentary.

Fasten your seat belts for this month’s Town Council meeting which will take place on Monday, March 11.

The B-List

Some July 9 Council meeting agenda items that could provide some sparks
By Will Collette

The two hottest topics on the July 9 Town Council agenda are whether this Council will fork over your tax dollars in the much-covered Y-Gate scandal and whether the Council will put an end to the phony Battle of Ninigret Park by giving Fish & Wildlife Service Charlie Vandemoer the keys to Ninigret Park as he has so long desired. There are separate articles on those two subjects. Click here for Y-Gate and click here for Ninigret Park.

But let’s look at some of the sleepers on the agenda and see which ones might provide some interesting action.

Searching for a Town Administrator Search Committee

Applicants represent a broad range of Charlestown interests

By Will Collette

NOTE: the links to committee applicants have been repaired. If you have trouble linking to those documents, please send us an e-mail.


One of the left-over agenda items from the June 11 Town Council meeting due to be handled at the June 25^th continuation is the choice of a group of citizens to review applications and vet applicants who want to be Charlestown’s next Town Administrator.

Personally, I think the search, and certainly the selection, should wait. There are, after all, only 140 days to the November election and as the philosopher Alex Trebek often says, “that’s when the scores can really change.”

But don't be surprised if the CCA (Charlestown Citizens Alliance) controlled Town Council majority wants to push to make the hire before they leave. It seems that the entire CCA agenda is in hyper-drive, as if this is their last chance to leave their mark.

Developments in DiBello v. Charlestown

Town Council member’s lawsuit against the Town takes some new turns

By Will Collette

In the past couple of weeks, there has been some movement on the conspiracy lawsuit filed by Council member Lisa DiBello against the town of Charlestown and the “Charlestown Ten” - present and former town officials.

The lawsuit stems from the unanimous Town Council vote on May 10, 2010 to fire DiBello as Parks and Recreation Director on the recommendation of recently resigned Town Administrator William DiLibero.

DiBello then ran for and won a seat on the Town Council on the motto “Because She Cares.” She promised  she did not intend to seek revenge for her firing. But only weeks after her election, DiBello filed an administrative complaint against the town and the individual officials. She alleges they engaged in a five-year conspiracy against her that culminated in her wrongful discharge.

So whose idea was this?

Who proposed spending $475,000 out of Charlestown's budget surplus for the Y Camp?
By Will Collette

People who follow Charlestown politics know that we have a lot of very fiscally conservative people inside and out of town government. It's one reason our taxes are so low, but also why we have so few town services as well as somewhat austere town facilities.

It seems like the most conservative of the fiscal conservatives gravitate toward the town's Budget Commission, where they can put their views into town policy through the way we spend and raise our money.

So the proposal by Budget Commission chair Richard Sartor that Charlestown spend $475,000 from the town surplus to buy a worthless easement on the overpriced, abandoned Y camp came as a big surprise. After all, one of the roles the Budget Commission plays is to bring their brand of conservative financial reality to the picture. If, for instance, the Town Council had decided to use Open Space/Recreation Bond funds to buy a crack house or a meth lab, I would expect the Budget Commission to tell them, errrr, no.

It is not the Budget Commission's job to facilitate irresponsible decisions by finding interest-free alternative financing arrangements. Unless I missed something in the Town Charter.

CSI Charlestown: DNA tests show CCA and RISC from the same gene pool

$59.99 from Amazon.com

There was a flurry of angry comments over a  Progressive Charlestown article I wrote that showed board interlocks between the RI Statewide Coalition (RISC) and the bogus research center the Ocean State Policy Research Institute (OSPRI).

A lot of those comments seemed to come from CCA supporters. That sparked my curiosity about why such a vehement reaction, especially since it had so little to do with the real topic of my articles – that OSPRI had put out a report that was 100% on the facts about what OSPRI considered to be wasteful government spending in Charlestown. I would have loved to hear them explain how cleaning up toxic contamination at the old Kenyon dump site is an example of wasteful spending.

Anyway, I decided to see if CCA had any genetic ties to either RISC or OSPRI and ran the appropriate DNA tests.

Here are the results:

Town officials’ lawyer fees back on the agenda

Will the deadlock on whether the town will pay for private lawyers to defend town officials from Council member Lisa DiBello's charges be broken?

We'll see what happens at the Town Council meeting Monday night, July 11.

How much will legal troubles cost taxpayers?

One of the touchiest topics on the Town Council agenda for Wednesday, June 15, is how much taxpayers will be liable to pay for past, present and future legal troubles. There are not one but two high-profile controversies coming before the Council on Wednesday.

One item centers on former Council President Jim Mageau and the other on present Council member Lisa DiBello. These items are related because both deal with the town’s obligation to indemnify town officials.

Under long-standing common law, we “indemnify” public officials, promising to stand by them when they get into legal trouble while performing their duties. It would be difficult to get anyone to serve in public office otherwise, since lawsuits are part of the everyday landscape of government.

But a public official's right to indemnification is clouded when the conduct in question isn’t clearly part of that official’s formal duties.

DiBello threatens court action against the town



Town Council member Lisa DiBello



Today’s Westerly Sun carried a page one scoop by Chris Keegan with major developments in Council member Lisa DiBello’s case against Charlestown and numerous past and present town officials. 

DiBello’s attorney Robert Savage told Keegan he plans to ask the RI Human Rights Commission to allow DiBello to skip the administrative complaint process and take her case directly to RI Superior Court. Savage says he will ask for a jury trial if permission is granted. He also told Keegan he chose this approach to speed up the process. Plus, the state courts are more favorable to plaintiffs than the federal system. DiBello also filed a complaint with the federal EEOC and could have sought to move the case to federal District Court.

NOTE: there’s a big difference between DiBello’s lawyer telling a Sun reporter he “plans” to ask permission to take the case to state court and actually filing the suit in state court. In cases like this, each side jockeys for leverage to improve its bargaining position for a settlement.

Note also that filing a charge is not the same as proving a charge, contrary to a flurry of anonymous comments posted on the Providence Craigslist in March and April.

OMG! Check out this OMA complaint

"The Secret Meeting" by Ilya Repin (1883)

Continuing our coverage of the hot issues from last Monday’s Town Council meeting, one of the least discussed and potentially most explosive issues was an Open Meetings Act (OMA) complaint (“Areglado v. Charlestown Town Council”) filed by neighbors opposed to Larry LeBlanc’s Whalerock wind turbine proposal against the Republican majority in the 2008-2010 Council.

The issues are a bit complicated and the plot twists can be challenging, so please be patient.

Former Council members Candi Dunn and Forrester Safford (both defeated for re-election) and present Council member Gregg Avedisian are charged with violating the law when they met with developer Larry LeBlanc at a 2009 URI conference on wind energy. The complaint alleges these three council members urged LeBlanc to develop what came to be known as the Whalerock project and assured him of their support.