The meetings are so great that they’re doing an encore
By Will Collette
Last Monday’s marathon Town Council meeting was dominated by the Invasion of the Money Snatchers – a platoon of non-resident property owners and their supporters organized by the RI Statewide Coalition and Charlestown Citizens Alliance – to protest even the idea of giving permanent Charlestown
Unable to complete the agenda for the evening, the Council set Monday night for a Special Meeting to complete the business left undone last Monday.
Some of the more interesting topics that will be taken up Monday:
Jim Mageau, newly released from the hospital, will take his place at the podium under Persons Wishing to Be Heard and will do his victory dance over winning a peculiar technical decision on an Open Meeting complaint he filed with the Attorney General. Background: last June, the Town Council was due to conduct its annual evaluation of Town Administrator William DiLibero. This was advertised as part of the closed-door Executive Session agenda. But DiLibero asked that his evaluation be conducted out in the open during the public regular Town Meeting. The Council members (Lisa DiBello not among them) gave DiLibero a positive evaluation, extended his contract and gave him a raise. Mageau was not happy about this action and said so. And he filed the Open Meeting complaint because DiLibero’s evaluation was conducted in public, rather than privately, as had been advertised. The AG’s office agreed that, technically, the change should have been advertised, or held over to the next meeting and the AG recommended a “do-over” of the evaluation.
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| Jim Mageau sees this as a criminal tool |
Friends of Ninigret Park Lisa DiBello .
Affordable Housing. There are three items on the Special meeting agenda carried over from the December 12 meeting. One is to discuss the process the town should be using to pick volunteers who wish to serve on Town Commissions. Even though the town already has as part of the Town Council Rules a provision that the “best qualified” persons should be chosen, apparently that’s not clear enough for Council member Lisa DiBello – especially after the battle over appointments to the Affordable Housing Commission that occurred at the November meeting.
The second Affordable Housing agenda item is discussion of the outcome of the marathon December 7 meetings where the fight over the Platner-Gentz Affordable Housing Deconstruction Act – a CCA-led effort to gut the state’s affordable housing law – came to a head. We’ve already covered this topic in depth, but suffice to say, the Platner-Gentz proposal died on December 7 and has been replaced with a much more sensible and practical proposal.
The third is to appoint one person out of eight applicants to file the last vacant slot on the Commission.
Since the hot and heavy disagreements over affordable housing have been at least temporarily resolved, these two items will probably not produce the kind of pyrotechnics we’ve seen in the past.
Dunkin’ Donuts sign. However, I think this agenda item has very high entertainment potential. Attorney Maggie Hogan will present the Dunk’s objection to town enforcement action against them for replacing their old sign with a new sign bearing the company’s new corporate logo. See here for more details.
So if you’re looking for something to do next Monday night, come on over to Town Hall and watch the show. There are always surprises.