You be the judge.
By Linda Felaco
At the January 9 Town Council meeting, Council President Tom
Gentz asked the town to focus
on “politics, not people” and to be “constructive, not destructive.” Mike
Chambers praised Gentz’s speech at the January
23 Citizens Forum and said he was going to stop reading “the Democrat site”
because it’s just a lot of “mudslinging and character assassination” and is
“uninformative.”
This comment puzzled me, because the web site of the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee
strictly deals with party positions and events and the only people named there
are committee members or members of our statehouse delegation, which happens to
be Democratic. Then it occurred to me that Chambers might have been referring
to Progressive Charlestown. Of course the blog is not affiliated with the town
committee, so I can only assume that Chambers was probably trying to spread
disinformation about his political opponents in order to curry favor with
the Charlestown Citizens Alliance
(even though they have no “membership”
per se).
So in the spirit of the new year and new beginnings, I
thought I’d try to quantify where Progressive Charlestown falls on those two
axes, constructive vs. destructive and informative vs. uninformative. I focused
on several areas with broad ramifications that we’ve covered extensively.
Of course, this is Progressive Charlestown, not Conservative
Charlestown. We don’t pretend to be neutral, and we’ve certainly written about
our share of polarizing subjects. So your view of our efforts is likely colored
by your political views. Indeed, there’s a well-known psychological phenomenon
called “myside bias” in
which people tend to believe information that confirms their preconceived
worldview and disbelieve anything that clashes with it.
As you’re no doubt aware, we’ve been covering the various
Lisa DiBello revelations extensively, starting with her
legal action against the town and then the dust-up
at the June Town Council meeting, which led us to investigate the awarding
of the beach concession contracts, her charity,
her game
and reality
show appearances, and possible
ethics violations, including the many ethics questions raised by her suing
the town while sitting on the Town Council. Has our coverage been
constructive or destructive? How informative are we being?
She's serving! She's suing! She's serving! She's suing! She's serving AND suing! |
Well, if you’re Lisa DiBello or one of her friends, you’d
likely call it destructive. If you’re someone who thinks DiBello is the “swing
vote” on the Council and that any improprieties should be covered up to court
her favor, you probably don’t like the facts we’ve publicized. If, on the other
hand, you’re a voter, taxpayer, someone who lost a bid for the beach
concessions to DiBello’s roommate, or someone who contributed money to her
charity that has not been properly accounted for, you may think otherwise. And
the series has been nothing if not informative—far too informative for some
people’s comfort, as a matter of fact. Some might think that the Price Is Right and Judge Mathis stories were gratuitous, except for the possible
on-air misrepresentations she may have made, which have a bearing on the rest
of the story.
Another topic we’ve delved into is the proposed
purchase of the old YMCA camp on Watchaug Pond. We favored the initial (and
subsequently defeated) plan to turn it into a conservation development and sought
to provide factual analysis to counter the anonymous,
often distorted or flat-out factually incorrect comments opposing the
project that were being published
without comment by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance.
If you stand to make over $700,000 profit on a property
sale, I suppose you’d find our criticisms of the current proposal for the town to
buy the property as open space destructive. Ditto for anyone who thinks we
should buy the camp at any price, to rescue it from predation by the evil
greedy developers, to
provide the Sonquipaug owners with open space, or as a donation
to the Y. However, if you think we should look carefully at how our tax
dollars are spent and how to put them to best use, I think you’d find our
airing of the issues to be constructive. Whether the town ends up making this “donation” to the
YMCA or not, we will be satisfied that we brought out factual information that
most citizens would not have known otherwise.
Regarding the Charlestown Democrats’ proposed Homestead
Exemption, if you’re a nonresident property owner, you made your feelings
on this subject quite clear at the December
12 Town Council meeting. If, on the other hand, you understood the proposal’s
aims, namely, to rebalance the tax load, which was shifted toward middle-class
homeowners in the last revaluation, you might be inclined to take a more
constructive view of the proposal itself and therefore our coverage of it. If
you know that state money resurfaced South County Trail and rebuilt Old Post
Road while the state has reduced financial support to the town and Chariho, and
that out-of-state landowners contribute no income tax to the state, you might
also take a more favorable view.
Average home value
(new assessment)
|
Average change in taxes for 2011-12
| |
CCA Leadership
|
$722,000
|
+3.4%
|
Town Council
|
$581,000
|
+7.2%
|
Charlestown Dems
|
$379,000
|
+11.25%
|
Ironically, some people have told us that we should not have been so informative in our explanation of the financial details of the proposal; it was our own “magic tax calculator” that gave the nonresidents the tax numbers they got so up in arms about.
Here’s one Councilor Dan Slattery probably doesn’t rate as
constructive: the “Deputy
Dan” series. How others rate it probably depends on their taste for
cheekiness and repurposing old children’s books, and their appreciation for
literary devices and metaphor, without which most writing becomes deadly
boring. How much respect the reader thinks elected officials deserve simply by
virtue of their office irrespective of their official conduct is also a factor.
If, however, you think voters have the right to know what their elected
officials are getting up to and whether they’re following council
rules, I think we’ve been constructive and informative.
Affordable
housing has been another hot-button issue, both around town and here on the
blog. If you think affordable housing is a plot by evil greedy developers to
destroy our bucolic little haven, you likely find our advocacy of affordable
housing destructive. Another oft-heard objection to affordable housing is that
because the recipients are living there for “free,” they won’t maintain the
property. These critics might be surprised to learn that two of the most
impassible (meaning difficult to move around in because of detritus piled up
everywhere) homes I’ve ever set foot in were owner-occupied homes valued at
~$800,000 each in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the wealthiest suburbs of
Washington, D.C.
If, on the other hand, you actually care whether people have
affordable housing, you’d be inclined to think we’ve been constructive and
informative in our efforts to stay on top of the various Town Council and
Planning Commission actions and inactions in this area.
Speaking of the Planning
Commission, if you’re a planning commissioner, you probably think we’ve
been destructive. But you have the power to put
our criticisms to constructive use. In fact, one of our key criticisms is
just how
much power the Planning Commission has usurped by fiat. Those who have been
subjected to the arcane and arbitrary dictates of the Planning Commission could
be expected to hold a different view of whether we’ve been constructive and
informative.
How you feel about wind
turbines likely colors your view of our coverage of the subject. Contrary
to what some seem to think, Progressive Charlestown has never advocated
industrial-scale wind turbines in Charlestown. Those who view wind turbines of
any size as the devil’s invention seem to find our advocacy of small-scale turbines
for residential use to be destructive. If, on the other hand, you think wind
turbines are a sensible move toward addressing the twin problems of climate
change and fossil fuel depletion, you’d be more inclined to find our take on
the issue constructive. But with 123 stories on wind turbines, I think it would
be difficult to argue that we haven’t been informative.
On the dark
sky ordinance, the beach pavilions, and the proposed red-light
cameras on Route 1, we’ve explored a wide range of views, including differing
opinions among the blog editors and anonymous (and sometimes intemperate and
even hateful) objections the CCA published without clarifying the writers’ many
errors of fact (see here
and here
for our annotated versions of the beach pavilion comments and here,
here,
and here
for the red-light camera comments). Our inclusion of opposing viewpoints I
think puts our coverage of these topics firmly in the category of constructive
and informative.
In short, if you want to impose your views on the town
without input or discussion, then you probably don’t see our efforts to present
our views as constructive. But if you want to make up your own mind based on
input from multiple sources, then you probably see this blog as a constructive
addition to the usual sources of town information.
Rather than merely pay lip service to the idea of openness
and transparency, we actually practice it. When we have been accused of spreading
“lies and slander,” we have repeatedly asked for any pertinent facts that would
contradict those we have presented in our articles, to no avail. We work hard
to get the facts right, but some people have a vested interest in making inconvenient
truths difficult to uncover, and like any other publication, we have had to
make the occasional correction. But it seems that our accusers just want us to
stop writing, period, because they are attacking the messenger rather than the
message.