Triple Feature Playing at Town Hall Tonight

The first is a nice family feature, the next two are horror shows

By Will Collette

Starting at 5:30 PM, the Town Council is running three meetings back to back.

The first meeting is the Council’s agenda-setting meeting where the Councilors decide what goes on next Monday’s regular monthly meeting agenda and in what order.

But along with that chore, the Council will also announce the award of the contract to build the town’s new beach facilities to Westerly construction company V&M Construction. They will authorize the Town Administrator to sign the contracts and move the project forward. V&M’s bid is $928,718. That sum does not include extra costs tacked on by the demands of the Planning Commission when they roasted this project in not one, but two, marathon sessions. Fortunately, the voters approved a $1.2 million bond measure to pay for the project.

After this, the night is almost certain to go downhill fast as it is devoted to the discussion of the plan by the CCA, Planning Commissar Ruth Platner and Town Council President (and CCA officer) Tom Gentz to destroy the state’s affordable housing law.

"Evolutionary adjustments"

First there will be a “joint workshop” of the Town Council and the Affordable Housing and Planning Commissions. That’s scheduled for 6 PM.

Then, finally, at 7 PM, the Town Council will convene the second Special Meeting of the evening to take the inevitable 3-2 vote in favor of the Platner-Gentz Affordable Housing Deconstruction Act.

We devoted a lot of space in Progressive Charlestown covering this issue. We revealed the true nature and design of the Platner-Gentz plan, which is to eliminate the state’s affordable housing problem by simply changing how you define affordable housing. We produced evidence to expose the distortions and misrepresentations made by the opponents of affordable housing.

As we have on every issue we cover, we encourage you to read the documents yourself and make up your own mind. Here's an article with the links that take you to the Platner-Gentz documents. 

Tom Gentz initially described this plan as an “evolutionary adjustment.” Just like the Chixalub Meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 

The Platner-Gentz proposal does absolutely nothing to help people who need affordable housing. We introduced you to many of them. We showed you the current state of Charlestown’s housing stock.

And we showed you Charlestown’s 1% - the wealthy elite who are represented by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, the prime mover behind this scheme to end any effort to help working families find places they can afford to live in.

We live in two different worlds and there is no common language or understanding. Tom Gentz has expressed some baffled defensiveness that he hasn’t been praised – except by the CCA and the Westerly Sun – for his efforts. But Gentz doesn’t get it, and I’m not surprised, since he lives in a very different world. And from the times I’ve seen him talk about the Platner-Gentz plan, I don’t think Gentz really understands what is in the document that bears his name.

While tonight’s two sessions on affordable housing will be painful in the way they will expose the reality of class war in Charlestown – a war by the rich on everybody else – perhaps something good will come of it.

The true nature of our greedy elite will become notorious when the Platner-Gentz scheme leaves Charlestown, makes its way to the General Assembly in Providence and becomes a statewide issue.

Maybe we can learn a little about ourselves, too. Charlestown is mainly a community of working families and retirees. Most of the houses in this community are assessed at between $200,000 and $500,000 (average $350,000).

But we also have an elite – roughly 300 families with $1+ million properties, and the means to support the lifestyle that goes with that. Most of them do not make Charlestown their permanent residence. This is the core of the CCA’s support and leadership.

Ironically, the evening begins with the approval of the beach facilities contracts. Just last spring, the CCA and Charlestown’s elite campaigned fiercely to get Charlestown to vote NO to that project. We don’t need decent toilets at the beach, they said, since we can simply walk from the beach to our waterfront mansions. We don’t want the beaches to be nice, they said, because that will only encourage the riff-raff.

I think everyone in town expected the CCA and its elite constituency to win last June, probably by a wide margin. Except that didn’t happen when voters said “YES” by 11 points.

The CCA will get its 3-2 Town Council victory on affordable housing Wednesday night. They should try to savor that victory as long as they can.