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| "This is Deputy Dan - OPEN UP! |
For Chariho, but not for himself
By Will Collette
Council Vice-President Daniel “Deputy Dan” Slattery learned a lot about openness and transparency as a career federal bureaucrat in Washington , DC
He learned that it is important to demand transparency of those around you while being as opaque and secretive about your own affairs as you can.
Deputy Dan was thwarted at the November 14 Town Council meeting from launching a new campaign for open and transparent government when his motion to launch a transparency jihad on the Chariho school system failed to get enough votes.
Curses! Deputy Dan needed a break to make up for his recent string of really bad moves – like his call for censoring who can speak at Council meetings, his bizarre solo investigation of evil-doing at Ninigret Park and his strange fixation with so-called “phantom” town properties – a fixation that could end up costing Charlestown taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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| We don't understand the budget |
Slattery’s beef with Chariho is this: Under a new state mandate, Chariho presented its annual budget in a form that complied with the mandate, but is too complicated for Deputy Dan to understand. So naturally, since Deputy Dan is a genius, it must be Chariho’s fault that he can’t figure out how to read the budget.
“The numbers don’t add up,” cried Deputy Dan. So this must mean someone is covering up the truth, and not that he might have failed arithmetic.
His remedy is to organize the other two Town Councils in the Chariho School District
He has the CCA behind him. Their website and recent e-bleats touted Deputy Dan’s plan to assemble a posse to go after Chariho as a great advance in good government. And they spit nails when his motion failed to get the required three votes. They cursed Council member Marge Frank for abstaining, although Marge explained that while she likes transparency, she thought Deputy Dan’s draft letter was insulting to Chariho.
And Deputy Dan and the CCA spin machine wrangled yet another page one article in the Westerly Sun to beat the drum for an issue that is pretty much a fevered manufactured fantasy. No link for the Sun article – it’s behind their pay wall, but it ran on page one of the Sunday, November 20, 2011 edition.
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| Ask Education Commish Gist to explain it to you |
The Chariho budget IS difficult to read. It is 135 pages long and done in the state-mandated format that is designed for state Education Director Deborah Gist’s staff’s convenience, not the voters. But an attack on Chariho’s administration is inappropriate.
Especially from Deputy Dan Slattery. Especially from the Charlestown Citizens Alliance
Both have much more glaring transparency issues of their own.
In Deputy Dan’s case, there’s the matter of his secret file from his investigation of complaints of evil-doing at Ninigret Park. Deputy Dan says he has a two-inch-thick collection of materials he collected from town hall staff that shows no wrong-doing occurred.
OK, I never did believe any wrong-doing occurred, but I want to see what is in Deputy Dan's file. I filed an open records act request to get those records, but was denied because Deputy Dan never turned in his file.
Deputy Dan brandished the file at the Town Council’s October meeting, referred publicly to it, and publicly invited other Council members to look through it. But he did not turn it in. The more he resists disclosing the information he collected, the more I wonder what’s in that file.
Hey, Deputy Dan, transparency begins with you. Don’t complain about others who disclosed what they were required by the state to disclose when you won’t disclose town records you collected in your investigation.
Unless of course you are prepared to publicly state that your investigation was wrong, not appropriate and far from official.
Take your pick, Deputy Dan: either submit those materials for the town record or admit that your investigation was another one of your vanity exercises. Is there a third choice?
Unless of course you are prepared to publicly state that your investigation was wrong, not appropriate and far from official.
Take your pick, Deputy Dan: either submit those materials for the town record or admit that your investigation was another one of your vanity exercises. Is there a third choice?
And then there’s the CCA. Ever since they took over the Town Council and Planning Commission in 2008 and became Charlestown
You can’t join the CCA. Their meetings are secret. Their membership is secret. Their decision-making process is secret. They only disclose the members of their steering committee. They insist that the opinions they publish be anonymous. I wouldn't be surprised if they wear hoods at their meetings. And the centerpiece of their political agenda is transparency and openness - for others.
They are a closed, secret society, yet they are also the power behind the Town Council majority – Slattery was former CCA president, Tom Gentz is CCA Secretary and a steering committee member, and Lisa DiBello seems to act as a bridge between the CCA and Jim Mageau. Strange as it seems.
Chariho School Committee member for Charlestown Deb Carney stood up at the November Council meeting and tried to explain how the Chariho budget process was changed by state mandate. She suggested that rather than declare war on Chariho’s administration, it might work out better for all concerned if Council members simply asked for the information detail they wanted.
But Deputy Dan and the CCA prefer a fight. What better way to conduct Charlestown