Town officials complain about influx of building permits, mostly renovations, but none for affordable housing

Surge in Building Permits has Charlestown Officials Scrambling

By CYNTHIA DRUMMOND/ecoRI News contributor

New beach home construction in the village of Quonochontaug. Charlestown officials say they have been dealing with a swell in building permits that began before the pandemic and has since intensified. (Cynthia Drummond/for ecoRI News)

CHARLESTOWN, R.I. — Asked how much his department’s workload has increased in recent years, the town’s building and zoning official, Joe Warner, laughed.

“It’s got to be tenfold,” he said. “Not just because of us being busier, but just all the additional regulations and things that have come into effect.”

The Planning Commission is also grappling with an increased workload. Commission chairwoman Ruth Platner has described development proposals in the past year as being at a “20-year high,” and in a July 5 blog post, she warned,

“We may reach a level of residential applications that will be impossible for the Planning Department and Planning Commission to review. Impossible or not, state law requires that we review and make decisions within a set number of days.”

Warner’s department has six employees, four full time and two part time. The last three years, he said, have been challenging.

“We’ve been slammed-busy with the construction side of it for the last three years, maybe even three and a half, and even when the pandemic came out, we didn’t slow down, but the nature of the jobs changed,” Warner said. 

“We went from a lot of bigger developments down to tons and tons of deck permits, basement finishes, swimming pools, a lot of homeowner permits for people who were trying to make their home place more livable because they were spending so much time at home.”

U.S. Census Bureau figures show that in 2019 Charlestown’s population was holding steady at 7,826. But the coastal town also has a large number of residences that are second homes owned by people from out of state. Last year there was an influx of those homeowners escaping urban areas and moving to their vacation homes full time, where they believed they would be better protected from COVID-19.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The new 2020 US Census figures show that Charlestown's population grew by 170 people over the past 10 years. That's 2.2%. We still have not surpassed 8,000 with the official population count for Charlestown now sitting at 7,997.  - Will Collette

Better late than never?

CCA weighs in on contract to allow local water to be used by fossil fuel plant developers

By Will Collette

Photo by Bob Plain, RI's Future on protest by tribal members

An October 6 e-mail by Charlestown Town Council President Virginia Lee  (read below) was forwarded to me. 

It included draft testimony (read below) that is to be presented tonight (October 10) to the state Energy Facilities Siting Board (EFSB) by Charlestown’s redoubtable Planning Commissar Ruth Platner.

The testimony is against an apparent agreement between some leaders of the Narragansett Indian Tribe and Invenergy Thermal Development, developer of the controversial proposed Burrillville fossil fuel power plant, to serve as a back-up water source.

Invenergy must show it has access to adequate water sources to meet permitting requirements.

Burrillville and other northern RI municipalities declined to provide Invenergy that back-up water guarantee, except Johnston. Johnston wants to offer Invenergy Providence water from the Scituate Reservoir as the source, much to the dismay of everyone fighting the plant and in face of a challenge from Providence.

Since Johnston's water deal may not work out, Invenergy needed someone else to sign up as a back-up provider and that’s where the Narragansetts come in.

They have water rights on their land to draw from the aquifers from which we ALL draw our water. 

The Providence Journal was the first to go public on September 28 that the Tribal Government had done the deal and we covered it that night.

Then our colleague Tim Faulkner at EcoRI confirmed the deal and got Tribal Medicine Man John Brown to go on the record giving his reasons why the Tribe took an undisclosed amount of money from the company. In a nutshell: “What else would you have us do?”

Bill Plain, our colleague at Rhode Island’s Future, covered a protest against the water deal and spoke to prominent Narragansett leaders who characterize the deal as illegitimate. From the remarks recorded by Bob at the protest, it looks like the Tribe is about to undergo another round of internal struggle.

It’s taken more than a week since the first public reports for the normally quick-draw opposition to emerge from the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) who own every elected official in Charlestown.

Here is Virginia Lee’s e-mail:

Langevin doesn’t like Amtrak Bypass either

Supports high-speed rail but not the proposed route

At a meeting Thursday afternoon, Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI) provided Charlestown Town Council President Virginia Lee and Westerly Town Council President James Silvestri with a letter he sent today to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), opposing the current proposal for realigning tracks in Washington County, as part of the Northeast Corridor Future “NEC Future” Tier 1 plan.

As currently laid out in the plan, the new rails would cut across nature preserves, family farms, and sacred tribal lands, and their siting has been vehemently opposed by town officials and residents throughout South County.

The honeymoon is over (with bonus video)

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

By Will Collette

The orders are still coming from the CCA Party's
secret clubhouse

Fool that I am, I really thought the new leadership of the Charlestown Town Council might be open to ideas other than those emanating from the secret clubhouse of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) or their non-resident financial backers.

I even made a number of suggestions where there might be ways to build a broad base of support for initiatives to make life better for all of us who call Charlestown our home.

Silly me.

But the first major barb that burst the bubble did not come from me. Instead, it came from the most unlikely of sources – a January 13 Westerly Sun editorial entitled “Hypocrisy back on the agenda for Charlestown.”

Here’s how the Sun editorial started:

The club atmosphere that has become Charlestown government in recent years got a little more blatant last week when the Town Council — in a Trumpian move — named one of its own to fill a vacancy on the Parks and Recreation Board after the board had vetted other candidates and made a recommendation for appointment.

The Sun followed up by putting the Charlestown Town Council meeting at the top of its weekly “Highs and Lows” editorial on January 15:

What a show in Charlestown last week. The Town Council picked a new member to serve on the Parks and Recreation Commission without the standard practice of letting the Parks and Recreation Commission first interview the candidate. Another candidate, who had been vetted by the commission and who has attended meetings as an interested member of the public and happens to be familiar with the workings of town government as a former town councilor, was ignored by the council. The new member selected is also a member of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, a political action committee to which all five council members also belong. The council claimed it knew better and that its choice was the superior choice. That sounds like rule by decree, not democracy.

This is not the first time the Sun has written an editorial critical of Charlestown’s CCA-controlled government, but such editorials have been rare and generally far more temperate.

This editorial (and its follow-up) was remarkable not just for its cutting language, but also because it may be the first time a new town council in the Sun’s reading area was so excoriated so early in its term.

So what was this all about?

“The first priority of any elected official is to the health, safety and welfare of its citizenry”

And not just if they have the time

By Frank Glista

This article originally appeared as a Westerly Sun Letter to the Editor

"Who has time to wade through that?" Photo by Will Collette

EDITOR'S NOTE: Senator Jack Reed announced on January 19 that the public comment period on the controversial Northeast Corridor rail plan will be extended for at least several weeks. The deadline was going to be January 31 but it will be later. We will provide the new deadline as soon as possible.

On Jan. 10, along with hundreds of other Charlestown citizens, I attended a meeting at the Charlestown Elementary School to hear comments about the proposed Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) proposal for the Northeast Corridor.

Listening to my fellow neighbors and some organizations speak about their potential personal loss of property, homes, farms and protected open space was heartbreaking, to say the least.

Our Charlestown Town Council, which is under the watchful eye of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) Steering Committee, said they were caught “off guard” by the proposal. 

A CCA web site article “Christmas Surprise for Charlestown from Federal Railroad Administration” on Dec. 20, sets the tone for citizens to react to this proposal.

Web master Ruth Platner comments to this article, “We have all just found out about this including town government.”

On Dec. 25, in an article she wrote to FRA she states:

“No one in the town of Charlestown, the government or the citizens, knew of the plan to build new rail lines and structures in our town until the Charlestown Citizens Alliance released their first post on this issue on Dec. 18, 2016.” 

But is this true?

During the comment period of the meeting held at the Charlestown Elementary School, former Town Council President Tom Gentz spoke about his objection to this proposal. Much to the surprise of some in the audience he announced:

“On November 2015, I received a letter from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and a 12-page glossy marketing document.”

Did he say November 2015?

Holding a copy of the large completed document he continued:

“Who has time to wade through that.”

Fight the Amtrak plan on the merits

But stop saying Charlestown was “blind-sided” or “surprised”

By Will Collette

Like most Charlestown residents, I was alarmed by recent details on the local segment of the Federal Railroad Administration’s plan for much-needed improvements to Amtrak service in the Northeast Corridor. The new route is intended to straighten out tracks in our area to permit high speed Acela trains to run at full speed.

The alarming piece is called the “Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass.” It would cut a wide swath through critical habitat and protected wild spaces such as Burlingame and the Frances Carter Preserve.

Neighboring communities face similar threats to their protected lands. It would even cut through the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposed new wildlife refuge to preserve our native bunnies.

Bear in mind the Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass is part of a gigantic, multi-billion Northeast Corridor rail modernization project that at best will take 30 years to complete. That assumes it gets funding from a radical Republican-controlled Congress.

We’ll be lucky if this Congress funds disaster relief for the Northeast the next time we’re hit by a big hurricane or blizzard, never mind a project like this.

This plan has not been approved by the incoming Trump Administration. For key positions, Trump has picked oil industry executives with no self-interest in public transportation projects. Incoming Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has no interest in this type of project.

Nonetheless, it would be irresponsible to ignore the threat, however remote, the Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass poses to our natural treasures.

There are some pretty powerful arguments on the merits against the Amtrak proposal, given the impact it will have on natural resources in South County and eastern Connecticut.

But Charlestown town government seems fixated on basing their opposition on their claim they have been hoodwinked by the feds. They claim the town was never given fair warning.

In her letter to the Federal Railroad Administration, Charlestown Planning Commissar Ruth Platner even implies that only the Narragansett Indian Tribe received any notice.

New Council President Virginia Lee complained to the Westerly Sun that the draft EIS didn’t explicitly mention Charlestown “so we’ve been totally out of the loop until now”. Lee also makes several references to the Narragansett Indian Tribe, implying they were “in the loop” while the town of Charlestown was not.

However, that’s simply not true.