Kill Bill, Part 2: CCA attacks Town Administrator over “honesty”

And they do it through bald-faced lies and distortions

By Will Collette

On March 31, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance Steering Committee sent out a new e-bleat, dated March 25, to their followers from their secret lair deep in the town’s salt marshes.

In it, the CCA outlines “another” example of Town Administrator Bill DiLibero’s high crimes and misdemeanors. They in fact have already publicized this exact same letter. So have their two Town Council spokespeople, Council Boss Tom Gentz and Deputy Dan Slattery. For the CCA, pretending to have found “another” terrible” crime lets them kick their “Kill Bill” campaign to a new level of intensity.

DiLibero, in their opinion, intentionally “covered up” a letter he received from a Boston regional Interior Department bureaucrat – for motives neither they nor anyone else has explained – regarding a municipal wind-energy project that was all but moribund at the time this “scandalous” letter was written.

If the CCA applied the same standards they are using to attack DiLibero to others, say, Deputy Dan Slattery or Planning Commissar Ruth Platner, their “Kill Bill” campaign might seem less hypocritical.

At issue is a January 18, 2011, letter written to DiLibero by Elyse LaForest, manager of the Boston regional office of the Federal Land to Parks Program. In the letter, LaForest nixes the idea of Charlestown placing three municipal wind turbines on the “southerly boundary of Ninigret Park.” She cites the terms of use for the land that were written into the 1979 deed agreement that transferred the land to the town. 

Her letter is a reply to DiLibero’s December 6, 2010, letter asking for Interior’s permission for the municipal wind turbine project The fate of that project was already hanging by a thread.

That’s because the newly elected Town Council, at its first meeting on November 15, 2010, voted to enact a six-month total moratorium on wind energy in Charlestown. The new Town Council majority consisted of CCA candidates Tom Gentz and Dan Slattery, with new Council member Lisa DiBello providing them with the majority vote.

This moratorium was the culmination of a blazing-hot NIMBY fight against Larry LeBlanc’s ill-advised, profoundly unpopular, financially infeasible and likely never serious Whalerock industrial wind farm proposal. Nobody liked that project, including me. The municipal wind project, on the other hand, was perceived as much less of a threat, unless you live in Arnolda.  

The municipal project almost but not quite became collateral damage of the moratorium enacted at the November 2010 Council meeting. DiLibero told the Council that the town’s partner, the Washington County Regional Planning Council (WCRPC), had hoped to submit a proposal by the spring deadlines to get federal funding. The Council unanimously amended its moratorium so the WCRPC and the town would have a shot at the $750,000 funding.

With that encouragement, DiLibero writes his December 6, 2010 letter to Interior official LaForest asking Interior’s blessing. Six weeks later, on January 18, 2011, she says no.

There was a Town Council meeting on January 10, 2011 (the week before LaForest’s letter), where Mr. DiLibero said town DPW workers had cleared space in the Park for the MET (meteorological) tower. The tower’s purpose is to measure wind speed and duration, data necessary to determine whether the municipal wind project was feasible. The tower also adds data to other new MET towers along the coast, providing researchers with important data.

Charlestown's federal overseer, Charlie Vandemoer

After LaForest’s letter came in, DiLibero reported at the February 14 town council meeting that he had met with our local federal overseer, Charlie Vandemoer of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, to discuss alternative locations for the municipal turbines.

He also reported that the MET tower was ready to erect, weather conditions permitting.

I looked at the minutes of town council meetings to see how the Town Administrator normally reported on his activities. DiLibero is always very detailed in relating his meetings, but I found no instance where he reported on correspondence. Since Town Council meetings usually take three hours as it is, I can understand why DiLibero did not add a list of his correspondence to his monthly Council report and can understand why no Council member seemed to want to know about his correspondence.

In his meeting reports, he noted another discussion with Vandemoer in March, again seeking alternative sites. According to the Westerly Sun’s account of this new CCA-concocted scandal, Council Boss Gentz was at that meeting, as was Councilor Gregg Avedisian. Are they also complicit in CCA’s alleged “cover-up?” 

At its March 14^th meeting, the Town Council majority once again extended the town moratorium on all wind energy. This led directly to the appearance of Jeff Broadhead, WCRPC director, at the April 20, 2011, Council meeting.

WCRPC's Jeff Broadhead tells the Town Council
the municipal wind project is really most sincerely dead

At that meeting, Broadhead reported that WCRPC and Charlestown had lost the $750,000 federal stimulus grant for the municipal turbines. No matter what alternative arrangements could be worked out for siting, the extension of the moratorium against wind power for another six months made it impossible for the municipal turbine project to be completed by the March 2012 completion deadline for federal stimulus projects.

The municipal wind turbine project, with or without Interior Department approval or a change of site to the portion of Ninigret Park that is outside federal jurisdiction, was dead at that point, murdered by the moratorium.

At the April Council meeting, Broadhead was asked by Council Boss Gentz how the loss of the stimulus grant affected the MET Tower. Broadhead told him it had no effect because the MET tower was funded separately through a WCRPC energy-efficiency block grant. This contradicts the CCA claim that the town “also went to the expense of installing a MET tower to measure wind strength.” Further, the tower was needed to supply data along with the other towers along the coast and on Block Island for research, regardless of whether any turbines ever got built anywhere in Charlestown.

The time elapsed between Elyse LaForest’s January 8, 2011, letter to DiLibero and Jeff Broadhead’s April 20 announcement that the municipal wind project’s funding was dead was just over 100 days. During that time DiLibero met at least twice with Charlie Vandemoer to work out an accommodation. I don’t know if such an accommodation could have been worked out, but after the March 14 extension of the antiwind moratorium, it would not have made a difference.

The CCA e-bleat complains that “the Town Council, town employees and the Town Administrator held hours and hours of meetings on this proposal throughout 2011”—the implication being that those hours and hours were spent fruitlessly and that DiLibero is somehow to blame for making everyone waste their time.

Sure, the town did spend lots of time during 2011 on wind power during 2011, but not on this project. It was half-dead when the first moratorium was enacted in November 2010, very dead in March 2011 when the moratorium was extended, and it was really most sincerely dead when WCRPC Director Jeff Broadhead told the Town Council the federal $475,000 grant was gone.

The CCA is deliberately mischaracterizing the “hours and hours of meetings” spent during 2011 to enact a permanent set of ordinances banning wind-to-electricity generators in Charlestown as having been spent on the municipal turbine issue instead.

That, folks, is the record.

Now, from the CCA’s perspective, they see deception without providing even the slightest hint of a motive, a reason why DiLibero would somehow commit such a terrible act.

DiLibero tried to explain at the March 12, 2012, Town Council meeting that he intended no deception. He received the letter and tried to work something out with Interior (as he reported at the time). But the municipal project died when the Council extended the antiwind moratorium in March 2011.

The town still had (and has) the MET Tower, which was paid for by the WCRPC, not the town as the CCA claims, sitting on the town’s land and supplying data that researchers at URI and the state need to study wind patterns for future wind-energy projects.

All this happened during the first few months of the new Town Council’s term. Other than Councilor DiBello, who was fired by DiLibero in March 2010 and, in March 2011, launched her legal action against the Town and DiLibero and others, DiLibero was on pretty good terms with the Council.

They seemed content to let DiLibero do his job without the kind of micromanaging that came later. When DiLibero received the January 2011 letter from Elyse LaForest, he had a choice to make – broadcast it or do his job and try to deal with it. As he explained on March 12, DiLibero decided to deal with it. And, oh boy, I’ll bet he wishes he had that one to do over again.

Two months after Elyse LaForest’s letter, the municipal wind project was dead by the Town Council’s hands, and LaForest’s letter was moot. The MET Tower was already erected with outside funding, not town taxpayer money.

The LaForest letter was moot until the CCA decided to dredge it up to fuel its “Kill Bill” campaign, which, in my opinion, is nothing more than a smokescreen for the CCA’s dirty hands in the Y-Gate Scandal.

No town money was lost or even at risk in the now-defunct municipal turbine project. Too bad we can’t say the same about the $475,000 in town money being flushed down the YMCA camp’s cesspools.

I know that rabid antiwind NIMBYs see some nefarious purpose in DiLibero’s handling of the LaForest letter. Fans of Lisa DiBello will think I am turning a blind eye to “evil, corrupt” DiLibero to spite their beloved LaLa.

I think that if DiLibero knew then what he knows now about the character of the members of this Town Council (or lack thereof), he would be asking them for a Council vote every time he takes a restroom break. He would certainly have sent them copies of every scrap of paper that came into Town Hall—although Deputy Dan doesn’t even see fit to share public records even with his council colleagues, much less the rest of the town. But DiLibero, like a lot of town residents, thought that Gentz and Slattery were grown-ups who would understand the need to let the Town Administrator do his job.

But now it’s expedient for them, for DiBello and for the CCA to try to shift the focus onto DiLibero in their own self-interest.

Charlestown has been fooled before by the CCA. Look at the timeline. Look at the Council meeting minutes. Judge for yourself. Yes, “honesty matters,” as the CCA says. It matters most of all when you're accusing someone else of dishonesty.

To read the CCA’s attack against DiLibero over the LaForest wind-energy letter, click here. Warning: Take a shot of Mylanta first, because it’s pretty sickmaking.